It is really hard to be both a San Diegan and a blogger.Recently, our Chief of Police casually remarked that if lawmakers play it right, Americans can be completely disarmed within “a generation.”Now, the spokeswoman for the San Diego Sheriff’s Department rails against bloggers!
This week the spokeswoman for the San Diego Sheriff’s Department was invited to a panel sponsored by a local journalism group called “Grade The Media,” and boy did she. She used her time on the panel to rail against one of her biggest issues with the media: fat bloggers who don’t wear proper footwear.To start, spokeswoman Jan Caldwell explained to the room full of journalists why it is so important to be nice to her: “If you are rude, if you are obnoxious, if you are demanding, if you call me a liar, I will probably not talk to you anymore. And there’s only one sheriff’s department in town, and you can go talk to the deputies all you want but there’s one PIO.”Then Caldwell went on to discuss why she would like to create a credentialing process in San Diego that discriminates against bloggers, using stereotypes from straight out of 2003:
You can sit with your Apple laptop and your fuzzy slippers, you can be an 800-pound disabled man that can’t get out of bed and be a journalist, because you can blog something. Does that give you the right—because you blog in your fuzzy slippers out of your bedroom and you don’t go out and you haven’t gotten that degree—should you be called a journalist?Or should you be like Pauline [unclear] who graduated from journalism school and has been doing this a long time or JW or Dennis? Are you on the same par? In my estimation—and I’d like to hear from Darren and Michael on that—no. Because Pauline and JW and Matt and the others that have been doing this a long time and they know the questions to ask, as will you. But if you’re just sitting at home with your laptop blogging and you just want to get under my skin or you’re CityBeat—left to Lenin, oh my God—then, yeah. So I drop that out on you all: what do you all think of that?
So many points to address:
But shame on us…asking for public records to which we are legally entitled in the first place.
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