In Oxford, I’ve always felt very lucky to still have a local paper. As Dr. Skilling pointed out a few weeks ago, they are a vital part of our community and can bring us together through a medium nothing else can touch.
This weekend I attended the outstanding local production of Annie and the great spring fair put on by the Daniel Axford/Oxford Elementary School PTO. I saw my community come together in a way that I had forgot we were capable of, due in large part to the way recent events have been covered by the Oxford Leader. Yes, the school bond was the tipping point, but in recent years the coverage has gone away from stories that inform and better our community to attacking our local leaders and taking such a strong, personal stance on issues that I no longer know if I’m reading a newspaper or a newsletter supporting one person’s agenda. I fully support your freedom of speech and would fight for your right to obtain and disclose information, but when I read C.J.’s column this week I decided I had enough.
C.J. has every right to speak his mind in his ‘my way or the highway? column each week, and I support him doing so, no matter how much I may disagree with his opinions.
But he crossed the line with the TEA column, by trying to incite members of the community to stage a rally in front of city hall and then barter a deal where he promised coverage of the event in his paper. Excuse me? How on earth is that unbiased journalism?
When the Leader decided to run ‘anonymous? letters from the wife of someone who works in the school district slandering our new superintendent, I knew you were beginning to push the envelope on ethical reporting. But now, I fear it’s almost dangerous. Through the school bond issue you have shown how much power you have in the community, but I worry it is close to being abused because you have no competition and are not putting voices in your paper that differ from your own. And I don’t just mean letters to the editor and the occasional guest column.
I don’t want to lose my paper, which is what I fear will happen if you continue down this road. There are many readers like myself, who as one reader so eloquently put it, ‘weren’t asked to move here.? But we are here now, and we want to work hard to make this community a better place to work, live and raise our families. But it sure would be nice to be able to do that with the support of our local paper.

Julie Fracker
Oxford