Dear Vlad…

Vlad the Impaler
Dear Vlad…
Dear Vlad…
Someone apparently vehemently disagrees with Dianne Foster’s article of February 20, 2022 entitled, "Wait a Minute, We Got in This Ukrainian Mess… How?”.
Northwest Citizen has recently received a spate of letters to writers of every stripe, written in anonymous hostage style, complete with glued on visual features. The letters uniformly warn that anyone associated with publishing the piece might risk the reputation of being a ’mouthpiece of Putin’, and insist the article should be deleted or ‘corrected’ within ‘the week’.
That’s not how Northwest Citizen works.
Northwest Citizen is a Bellingham based website that provides an opportunity for citizens to publish their (mostly, but not always) local views. It is one of the oldest political blogs on the Internet. Each writer retains the copyright for their work and no one writer ‘represents’ NWCitizen.com. Every writer’s opinion is their own. We have editors but no editorial board.
This is central to the mission and purpose of Northwest Citizen. Even commenters use their own real names. We check them out. Northwest Citizen believes truly free speech issues from real people and is, as such, more valuable than corporate monied speech or the anonymous judgments of trolls. Northwest Citizen was founded in 1995 as a small counterbalance to the narrow media script that often fails to inform the public of important, alternate community perspectives.
As one of the earliest contributors to NWCitizen, I welcome you to express your opinions, and invite you to submit a guest article to editor@nwcitizen.com. Most regular writers start with a guest article and find that personally standing behind their perspective is more fulfilling than scribbling graffiti anonymously on the walls of the internet - and that elevating individual complaints to open dialog in a healthy public discourse allows truly free speech to flesh out the facts.
Thank you for reading and contributing to a civil community dialogue.
At Northwest Citizen, you will need to do it under your real name.
9 Comments, most recent 2 years ago