Mary Newsom

An interesting little war is going on over at the Charlotte Observer sponsored blog titled The Naked City - "Mary Newsom on growth in the Charlotte region"



Anonymous said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
2/19/2010 05:39:00 PM

I have long noticed that blogger Mary Newsom has made a habit of deleting comments she doesn't agree with, a palatable sign of narcissism I suppose. A firestorm of comments on the 3 posts she made during the week regarding the Yadkin River Bridge appear to really get to her on Friday.

This little war of words and her deletions peaked with her post titled "Road hater"? Read the facts, please!

To all the folks bent out of shape because I suggested that NC DOT might have fared better if it had pushed for stimulus money for the commuter rail line in Mecklenburg instead of to repair the Yadkin River bridge, please read what I wrote, both Thursday and Wednesday.

I never said the Yadkin bridge shouldn't be fixed.

It's one thing to be mad about a rickety bridge. I completely agree. But how about reading the facts BEFORE you start with the insults?

"I've been contemplating shutting down comments completely, because so many people are such jerks that it seems to just bring out the hostility all around"

As I have already pointed out Ms. Newsom has a bad habit of deleting comments she doesn't like, doesn't agree with or finds for one reason or another "offensive".

After a couple of readers commented on the deletions she posted this:

Mary Newsom said...

Oh for Pete's sake! I am clearly not removing negative comments. Read them for yourselves, above.

I am removing comments that use obscenity and that are insulting. Some of them insult other commenters. Some of them insult me. Don't insult people or use bad language, and your comment stays.

Cedar Posts agrees that every once and a while someone would get out of hand and put in an expletive or rather poorly chosen word. But I don't use language that is offensive and yet I've had my comments deleted by Mary Newsom as well.

Mary claims she only deletes comments that insult people and even so the following comment remains on her Friday posting:

"Most of the people against these initiatives are clueless. COMPLETELY CLUELESS. You can't reason with them because rational thinking is not what they do. It's not how their brains operate. They only know what exists and can't imagine anything different. They respond to challenges by doing the same old thing, even when it doesn't work (i.e. build more roads to reduce traffic congestion). They have an impossible time with counter-intuitive problems (they get a funny look on their face). See George W. Bush and Sarah Palin as good examples."

Cedar Posts will not delete opposing comments, even foul language. If it is really bad CP might edit it but your comments are important to the discussion and they mean a lot to CP.

I really have an issue with Ms. Newsom's method of removing the words in a comment, rather than deleting the comment completely thereby allowing the empty comment to sit like a disruptive student's empty chair in a class room.

Wednesday's Post had 12 comments all positive, Thursday's post had 32 comments of which 6 were marked as deleted.

On Friday's post Ms. Newsom removed 14 and 85 comments nearly 17%.

It seems is if Ms. Newsom is on a Tiger Woods ego trip where control of everything including opposing opinions are not tolerated.

Mary as all of us who blog the news of the day count the number of comments as a gauge of success, no comments then FAIL. So her idle and rather childish threat to remove the comments should be met with the proper response. Stop commenting and boycott Mary Newsom.

I suggest that Ms. Newsom either stops blogging altogether or let the comments ride and harden up.

By the way building a light rail line in one direction while allowing a bridge to fall into a river in the other direction is just the kind of thinking I'm used to seeing from Mary Newsom.

Update: No need to boycott Mary Newsom shut down the comments on her blog.