I know many people on this forum refuse to read "the rag" or "bobo's paper" or whatever the latest reference to the Observer is these days, but I find it endlessly interesting, in a watching-a-train-crash sort of way.  While some people on this board aren't interested in discussing this, and want to just insult/ignore him, I think it's worthy of discussion.  Not much in here will be "new news" for regular readers here, but I'm hoping that it enlightens some folks who haven't yet seen the light.  People like the young woman who sat in front of me at Thursday's meeting and said "You know, I used to not be able to wait until that paper came out, and then I realized the truth and now it drives me crazy."

Slager actually uses a fairly impressive set of media tactics to present his story, not unlike how Fox News gave comfort to the Bush administration and now attacks the Obama administration.  Let's take a look at how he's doing it.  Please note a couple of things:

1. While I respect and appreciate everybody's feedback, I'm hoping to keep this conversation to constructive comments only.  I respectfully ask that, if you wish to vent your anger, you do it in another thread on this site.
2. The Observer is, realistically, a blog.  While there is a paper format, I'm going to focus primarily on the website here, as that's what's updated more frequently, and where all of my source information comes from.  But if we look at it objectively, it's one guy (maybe 2 if we can confirm the existence of Paul Shooter) who updates a website and doesn't follow some standard journalism ethics.  That makes it a blog.  Therefore, I'm going to use "post" instead of "article" when talking about his site.

Changing the story without acknowledging being wrong, or noting an update.
Leading up to Thursday night's meeting, Slager had dubbed the meeting a "recall rally" multiple times.  In his Ending the Civil War in Wareham post, he stated "It is a recall rally, plain and simple, one held in a public building that was paid for by your tax dollars (the advertisement for this event was placed on the Wareham Recall 2009 web site weeks before it was placed in the Standard-Times and the Courier)"  I'm going to ignore for now the factual inaccuracy of his statement about the ad being on the Wareham Recall website - it simply wasn't, and Brady isn't affiliated with that group, nor does he agree with their plan.  He also states "The Observer has been predicting this recall attempt for more than a year. The only reason it has taken this long is because the power elite arrogantly assumed they could put us out of business first" and "Next Thursday night the line will be drawn. The recall crew will try to keep the good people of Wareham from having a say in their own future" and "The CBW is knee-deep in this recall effort" and "The group shouldn’t be trying to hide in the shadows, pretending it doesn’t want a recall".  There are probably more references, but as interesting as this is to me, I don't have time to Google for all of them. 

Now, what happened on Friday, the day after the meeting?  We went from 33 references to the word "recall" on his site down to 9 - 2 of these were in a poll question, 2 are accusations that the S-T is lobbying for a recall, 1 is in a Jeer, and only 4 are relevant to his accusations of the meeting being some sort of "recall rally"  No reference that he was wrong, no apology as Mr. Brady requested for misinforming the public, nothing.  It just sort of disappeared.  This is a classic tactic used by those that want to control the flow of information - by not admitting he was wrong or issuing a retraction, readers will go on assuming that the information was correct, even though Mr. Slager knows that it's not.

There are many other examples of his changing posts on the site sometimes within minutes of the post first appearing on the site.  I documented here a week or so ago an example where one of his posts had been updated 8 times in the same day.  The "Stop Changing the Subject" post has already had two sections updated.  Nowhere in this does he follow the standard journalistic practice of noting that the information has been updated.  There has been one post over the past month or so that he noted was updated, but only marked one of the many updates, and didn't denote what had changed.

Misleading use of polls and contact information
Wikipedia says that selection bias "is a distortion of evidence or data that arises from the way that the data are collected. It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The term "selection bias" most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, due to the method of collecting samples. If the selection bias is not taken into account then any conclusions drawn may be wrong." (emphasis added).  The polls on his site are accessible only to registered members.  The population of registered members is going to be very strongly weighted towards being supportive of the BOS and Mr. Slager himself.  Very few people on "the other side" are going to pay to be registered, therefore very few people are going to vote against the Slager agenda in the polls. 

Similarly, he quoted in today's post that he "had 237 e-mails and 84 phone messages. Not a single person complained about “race-baiting.”"  The problem with this statement is that nobody who disagrees with Slager will email or call him to discuss it, due to the history there.  Those people will post here, or on the Standard-Times boards, or in other areas.  While we have no evidence of the quantity/quality of the emails and phone messages, and many people here will doubt his numbers, it is not surprising at all that nobody contacted him in opposition. 

Slager's presentation of this type of information as being representative of the population at large is misleading at best, and a flat-out lie at worst.

Extensive quoting of himself in his posts
This has been discussed in great detail on here in relation to "Paul Shooter", but the fact that numerous posts were made with no author attributed that quoted himself extensively is fishy at best.  Retroactively adding "Paul Shooter" to the byline after being called out repeatedly on this board is even worse.  But worst of all is breaking the patterns that he had with other 'correspondents' and 'employees' by not introducing Mr. Shooter.  There is no evidence that Mr. Shooter exists, and even less that he actually wrote the columns quoting Slager.  Any credibility that he might have had goes down the tubes by having a 'phantom' author.

Making himself the news
The Twitter poster 'takebackwareham' noted that Slager's post about Thursday's meeting included 864 words about Slager's "defiance" of the media ban, and only 168 about the meeting itself.  What was the real story from Thursday?  According to everything that he had written up to Thursday, it was the meeting and the CBW's attempt to launch a recall effort.  How come that wasn't the focus of the article on Friday?  Whether it's his ego, a distraction tactic, or something else, Mr. Slager felt that the story had to be about him, rather than the meeting itself.  There are numerous other examples in the past about him insterting himself into the stories, but I don't have access to go back that far.

The second, more important, fact that I have not yet seen reported was Slager's perspective on the possibility of getting arrested.  After Thursday's meeting, he hung out in the hallway for about 10 minutes, talking to attendees.  To his credit, he took more than a little bit of crap from attendees, and did not get angry about it.  However, immediately before leaving he told another attendee "You know, I'm not sure I would have minded if I got arrested...it might've been a good thing"  I know this for a fact, as I was standing approximately 8 feet away by the food tables while he was against the wall to the outside. This statement is very telling - makes it clear that he would've been completely ok if the story turned into his arrest, as opposed to the meeting itself - another attempt to change the subject (described further below).

If you repeat it enough, it must be true
Slager has a bunch of terms that he uses repeatedly across multiple posts, with the idea of drilling it into people's minds.  These include:
*Power Elite - One would think that this would refer to a group of folks who are in power in the town, but it apparently refers to a group who are politically opposed to those currently in power.  I don't know enough about the group to comment about the "elite", but the group he's referring to his most definitely not in power.
*Brady being able to "dictate" attendees - Slager is obviously trying to get people to associate Mr. Brady with a dictatorship, going so far as to say that "(a)ll they want is a dictatorship" in today's post.
*This site is "controversial"/"hatebloggers" - Nobody has called this site controversial except for Mr. Slager and his followers.  There are a few posters here who, in my opinion, push the insults/comedy too far, but the vast majority of the people here are just angry at the situation, and view Mr. Slager as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the people who have gotten us into it.  By using terms like "hateblogger" and "fake Wareham Observer site", Mr. Slager is attempting to discredit everything stated on here, no matter what the basis of the comments are.
*The S-T/Courier give Slager no respect - It seems obvious that the two papers in question view Mr. Slager as I stated above - as a blogger.  With the majority of his writing being opinion-based, these papers don't have much of a reason to respond to, or even acknowledge, him....so they don't.  By repeating these charges, though, Slager is able to substantiate his "control of information" accusations, and give some merit to them (at least among the people who share his viewpoints)

This is just a small part of a larger list of terms/concepts that he repeats, under the idea that it will turn the ideas into facts after enough repetitions.  How many people thought there were WMD's in Iraq before/during/after the invasion?  This is the same tactic.

Changing the Subject
I wasn't going to include this as a separate topic, but as it's the headline of his post today, I felt I had to.  Nowhere in his post about changing the subject does he say what the subject was, what it now is, or who changed it.  I'll break down his individual statements later, but he states that the meeting was "supposed to be a defining moment for the power elite".  Reading the invitation on this site, the meeting was supposed to be an opportunity for Mr. Brady to present his view of what's wrong with Wareham's leadership, and for others to air their concerns as well.  This is exactly what happened. However, with Slager framing it as having been aimed at being the be-all and end-all of political rallies (which was never the goal), he can then claim that it was a failure because it didn't meet those standards.  When framed accurately, as having been a forum to air concerns about leadership, the meeting was a rousing success.

Presentation of Opinion as fact
Historically, Mr. Slager has failed to separate his Opinion posts, which have been very common over the past several months, from his News posts.  He would probably claim that the fact that there is small text saying "In This Corner" denotes an opinion column, but he really should be clearer about the differentiation, preferably putting all of the opinion posts on one page, and all of the news posts on a completely separate page.  This way there would be no chance of a reader coming across his opinion, and thinking it was fact. 

Overstatement of claims
The strongest example of this is when he claimed to have "uncovered" that Mr. Brady was the one running the meeting last Thursday, because he had a record of the rental agreement from the hall.  I'm not sure how this was "uncovered", when the meeting itself was first announced on this message board in a post from the user 'bbrady' who, it is commonly known, is Mr. Bob Brady.  I thought it was fairly obvious who was planning the meeting right from the get-go.

Accusations of restrictions of the flow of information
The Interim Town Administrator (ITA) recently issued a policy that any information going to the press from town employees had to go through him after the police chief wrote a letter to the editor supporting one of his men.  Bob Brady, who holds no position in town government, spent his own money to rent out a hall so he could have a specific discussion with certain people, and rightfully claimed that he had the right to restrict attendance.  Which of these sounds to you like control of information?  If you thought it was the ITA, you and Mr. Slager would be in disagreement.  Mr. Slager has continually referred back to the fact that the meeting was in the school, a public building, but selectively did not mention that Mr. Brady paid to rent out the hall for the duration of the meeting.

Selective non-inclusion of facts
From today's post about the community meeting: "After 20 tense minutes, Brady announced to the audience that the police would not enter the auditorium."  What he doesn't state here is that Brady announced that the police had the right and the authority to remove the uninvited people, but would not do so because it would create more of a scene than it was worth.  Inclusion of all of the facts leaves the reader with a very, very different understanding of the situation.  Slager's story is "we fought the law, and we won and got to stay."  The real situation is "Legally, we had no right to be there and the police could have removed us, but they didn't want to turn us into martyrs, so they took no action"  Which of these stories better supports Slager's agenda?

Other topics
There were other things that I wanted to include here (including those listed below), but I'm running out of time.  I'm going to post what I have so far, and write about the following items (and maybe some others) later on.

Sarcastic use of "quotes" around "things"
Inclusion of facts that have no bearing on current situation, but attempting to draw a line
A breakdown of some of his statements from today's post