By Jean Doran Matua, Editor
If you happened to be downtown Kimball during lunchtime Tuesday, Dec. 11, you probably witnessed a rare sight: a picketer on Main Street. Naturally, there’s a story behind it.
Last month, Paul Lysen of Kingston Township was irritated by my editorial that week about the importance of journalism and of journalists. He emailed a letter to the editor proclaiming that “the journalists of today feed us a constant stream of lies intended to destroy Republicans ….” The slanderous statements only increased from there. Nothing in the letter was of local relevance, and neither did it pertain to either me or my newspaper.
I responded by email that, on advice of our newspaper attorney, I would not publish his letter. Not satisfied, he called to pressure me into publishing it. Again, I declined.
So, Lysen appeared on our doorstep a couple of weeks later with a picket sign that read “UNFAIR! Tri-County News won’t print truth.” He may have been there about an hour and a half. We were busy preparing last week’s paper for press, so we barely noticed him.
How utterly ironic, though, that a man chooses to exercise his First Amendment rights to protest this newspaper exercising our First Amendment rights. What a great country we live in!