Saturday, March 24, 2007

This editorial will appear in Sunday's print edition:

The fort and public opinion

A few folks who hoped to dissuade local and state officials from building a model fort at the Historic Fort Dobbs site think we're up to no good.

In e-mails and phone calls, they've all but accused the R&L of trying to manipulate public opinion regarding the level of community support for the project. That's nonsense.

Here's what happened:

Monday was the final day for our online poll asking visitors if they thought public money should be used to pay for the model fort.

As she was preparing to replace that question with a new one, Web content manager Jess Norman wrote down the vote totals for the Fort Dobbs question, then created a new poll and directed our Internet publishing software to push the new question onto our Web site. We then published the results Jess recorded in the next day's edition.

The problem arose when a flurry of votes on the Fort Dobbs questions came in during the 30-45 minutes it took for the new poll to be published. We believe there were as many as 100 votes during that time period, the majority of whom were from anti-fort crusaders hoping to make their views known.

Some of these same folks expressed their dismay when their votes were not included in the results we reported in the print edition of the R&L on Tuesday. They inferred that we intentionally did not count their votes in an effort to misrepresent public opinion.

We regret that all of the votes were not tallied and published.

But these conspiracy theories are misguided and a little humorous. We're not interested in manipulating public opinion about Fort Dobbs. We think the fort is an exciting project that will help teach young people about local history. It also might attract tourists to our area, which would benefit local businesses.

It's a safe bet that the fort is going to be built. The question that remains is whether opponents of the project are going help make sure it's the best possible historic site or whether they are going to continue to stand in the way. Now that would make an interesting poll.