I’ve been in the “media” business pretty much all my life.
I’ve always felt that the media has a responsibility that goes beyond providing the service of news and entertainment. The media should set a standard for discourse and civility. We in the media have the biggest platforms for distributing information or a point of view and we should be mindful of how that platform is used.
Our company owns and manages multiple media platforms; print, radio, TV and digital. The most challenging of our outlets is the digital, myparistexas.com. This website and its complementary Facebook page are often the first with breaking news and information among our platforms and people are often encouraged to comment or give feedback/input on stories or posts.
This is the internet, and everyone has an opinion but, we do draw a hard line when it comes to the public interaction or discourse on our website or page.
Our policy and procedures clearly state our position and the limits we tolerate in public posts. We will not under any circumstance allow anyone to express hurtful or threatening comments to any group or individual.
This goes especially for our law enforcement officials. These folks do a difficult job under increasingly difficult circumstances and regardless of how you may feel about them we absolutely must have them on the job. Our men and women in uniform are increasingly the targets of vile, hateful and even threatening comments in online posts and we simply will not condone on enable that in any form.
Any media outlet that allows those “discussions” to go on without removing extreme comments and pretends they are doing a service to the people’s right to be heard is just not being responsible. The truth is many digital outlets encourage or protect these negative comments because they are fishing for “hits or clicks” and higher ratings.
We can have a responsible discussion on law enforcement any time but, when you allow death threats and memes to appear on your page website against law enforcement you become part of the problem. You would not allow that activity against a minority group of any kind and this should be no different. That activity is not “cool” or “woke” or whatever; it is childish and irresponsible.
I don’t speak for other media outlets you may view but, I promise you, as a regular reader or user of any of our platforms we will conduct ourselves at MyParisTexas.com and MyParisTexas.com Bi-Weekly News with the respect our uniformed protectors deserve.
They deserve nothing less.
James Wyatt
President – 1st Street Media
