N&R editor Jeff Gauger — who took heat for his awkward attempt at humor in the heat of the Amendment One debate — goes off (unposted) on John Hammer’s “schtick” of “one-sided keyboard attacks” when reporting on alleged push polling in the Senate District 27 race between Trudy Wade and Myra Slone.
As I said before, I’ll let Hammer answer for himself. As for my role, I inferred that Hammer had inside information that former N&R reporter Eric Townsend was one of the “mainly anonymous sources” when in fact he was named in one of Joe Killian’s stories. If I offended anyone with my choice of words, I apologize.
As for who’s behind the push polling, Gauger writes:
But Slone also suggested that a tea party group, Conservatives for Guilford County, was behind the polling.
That’s not proven, although we know –and reported last week —that tea partiers staffed phone banks Monday in Randolph County and July 10 in Guilford County.
We further know, based on dissemination of this information on multiple Facebook pages, that an out-of-state conservative activist group is training tea partiers across North Carolina on how to use phone banks. Push polling is a rotten, cowardly dirty campaign tactic.
Gauger complains that Hammer is connecting imaginary dots, but what do you call this? And if the N&R’s going to call out every “rotten, cowardly, dirty campaign tactic,” this election season, they’d better get busy, because they’re going to be a lot of them.
