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Charles Greenhalgh

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Kate Vachon, press coordinator

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Local paper bows to CMI intimidation, rejects critical letter

(TAMWORTH, NH, August 5, 2004) At least one local newspaper has bowed to pressure from Club Motorsports Inc. (CMI) and refused to publish a letter presenting a discouraging financial analysis of the developer’s business prospects, Focus Tamworth has learned.

CMI wants to build a racetrack for fast cars and motorcycles on the north face of Mt. Whittier in Tamworth. Construction has not yet started on the project.

The letter was submitted to several local papers on July 26 by Tamworth property owner and Boston venture capitalist Alex Moot. It ran with slight modifications in the August 4 edition of the Conway Daily Sun, the only daily paper in the Mount Washington Valley. The same modified letter ran on July 29 in the Laconia Citizen, a daily paper that serves New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. Susan Richards of the Citizen news staff said that she was not aware that anyone at the Citizen had been contacted by CMI about the letter.

But Steve Eastman, the publisher of the Mountain Ear, a Mount Washington Valley weekly, told Moot he would not run the letter at all because he had been warned by a CMI representative that it contained "libelous statements." In his note to Moot, Eastman cited a recent court case involving the Keene Sentinel in which both the paper and a letter-writer were sued for publishing false and damaging statements about a public figure.

Mark Guerringue, publisher of the Sun, told Focus Tamworth that his paper had also received calls urging him not to publish the letter, from both CMI publicist Scott Tranchmontagne and a lawyer for CMI. "There was a reference in the letter to Condodemetraky’s past business experience…we had no way of checking that, so we decided to take those two paragraphs out," Guerringue said. The Sun contacted Moot, who agreed to the deletions. The Citizen deleted the same two paragraphs when it published the letter.

The Sun invited Tranchmontange to submit a CMI response. The response ran in the August 4th edition alongside Moot’s letter. The response attacks Moot’s credibility but does not specifically dispute most of his figures.

Guerringue told Focus Tamworth that he received a second call, this time from a CMI lawyer, late last week. "He never mentioned anything about a lawsuit, just said we shouldn't publish it. I said, ‘Well, as far as we know it’s an opinion based on [the writer’s] information and we’re going to publish it,’ and that was the end of it."

Terry Leavitt, editor of the weekly Carroll County Independent, was also called by a CMI representative and told that the letter could be libelous. "CMI said that Alex had misrepresented himself to get the information. I'm talking it over with my publisher. The letter is still in my files," she said. The letter did not run in this week’s issue of the CCI.

"We understand the Mountain Ear’s reluctance to publish Mr. Moot’s letter in the face of these threatening calls from CMI. But we admire the Sun for standing up for its freedom to make its own decisions on what to publish," said Focus Tamworth spokesperson Charles Greenhalgh. "This kind of intimidation is typical of how CMI operates. When they don't like something, they threaten to sue, as they did during the negotiations for Tamworth’s Racetrack Ordinance."

-end-

Note to editors: the text of Alex Moot's letter as it ran in the Sun is available at http//www.focustamworth.org/conway_daily_sun_8_4_04.htm.