posted 2006/01/19 at 12:53
Uh ... hi.
All I can say is that for the past week, I've been having an even harder time than usual dealing with my personal problems here, which likely caused me to get sick first thing upon waking up this past Friday. Instead of doing something meaningful during my long weekend, I wound up watching all of the first two seasons of SVU on DVD as I tried to rest and recover from this bug. I'm past the worst of it now, but I'm still coughing and sneezing up all kinds of nasty junk.
Anyway, just before I got sick there, I started publicizing the first UT Un/Gagged meeting for the term, which will be tomorrow. The last time I tried to get Un/Gagged started I got a mention from one of the local radio Rush Limbaugh-wannabes who decried the group, which wasn't much in the way of press. This time, a couple of days after I sent the first e-mail out on UT's listserv, I got an e-mail from someone at one of our local free papers here confirming details with me.
However, yesterday I had a local television person start to contact me abot the group. Specifically, someone from our local Fox station. Now, I know that not every local Fox affiliate is one of Rupert Murdoch's Weapons of Mass Disinformation, and that the people in charge of Toledo's Fox station may very well be just as liberal as I am. That doesn't totally put things in the clear -- if the local Fox station filmed me, that video would become part of the general Fox News media bank, meaning that I could still easily show up on The O'Reilly Factor or Hannity and Colmes or something like that -- but in and of itself, being contacted by the local Fox station wouldn't be too much to be worried about.
Here's the thing, though: when I sent the e-mail out to UT's listserv, for my contact information I listed my e-mail account on UT's servers. (That's how the free paper guy got hold of me.) The Fox guy didn't try to contact me that way, though, nor did he get a hold of me via my seanshannon.org e-mail account. He contacted me via my maloneysbaloney.org e-mail address. Of all the ways someone from Fox could get hold of me, this guy chooses an e-mail address from the Website I put up to counter the arguments of a right-wing film about education. I find that to be just a bit more than totally freaking creepy.
Then this morning I got a voicemail from the secretary of UT's English Department, stating that this Fox guy was calling the department office trying to get hold of me. Okay, first of all, I didn't put a phone number on the Un/Gagged advertisement, because I am very cautious about giving my cell phone number out, and I don't have another phone number I could use for Un/Gagged now. (Hopefully if we get an office from the University, we'll get a phone for there.) Even if this reporter was digging through UT's records, though, he should have gotten the phone number for the office I share with about fifteen other graduate students. Instead, he calls the secretary of the office. I had to go around to everyone in the family and tell them not to accept any calls from this guy for me, in case he decides to open up the Toledo phone book and start calling every Shannon listed in there.
I can't say that I don't appreciate press and publicity, even for something as controversial as this -- I can handle rational criticism about Un/Gagged's presence on campus -- but I don't need this crap from this Fox guy, especially when I'm still trying to get over this bug here. Grrr.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon