The Monday night city council meeting in Johns Creek was heated and Mayor Mike Bodker confessed he was “pissed”. People online were likening him to the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, and calling him “crooked”. He’ll have you know he’s a member of the Republican party and certainly not a communist, he told his assembled constituents.
It’s alternate facts, he insisted later.
Another fellow politician, councilman Lenny Zaprowski, berated a local news blog. “Shame on you,” he said to the founder of the Johns Creek Post, Jennifer Jensen, and its editor EJ Moosa, who were among those attending the raucous meeting.
Welcome to Johns Creek, Georgia – a small community, like many others across America, that is grappling at times bitterly with the same profound changes to media and politics that have swept across the nation, especially in the era of president Donald Trump.
In recent years America has seen the decline of traditional news organisations, the rise of social media and internet publications, attacks on the press from politicians and a growing sense of partisanship in covering the news, culminating in a fear actual facts are now in short supply. That debate has played out on a national stage, especially with Trump, whose frequent assaults on the media have become a signature of his administration.
But nowhere is the argument being had more fiercely and fervently than Johns Creek, Georgia, an otherwise sleepy, well-off suburban community on the edge of Atlanta. The small-town vibe has been blown open by a bloodcurdling atmosphere of insults, accusations of dictatorship, fake online identities, attempts to set up official media by under-siege officials and the rise of a wildly popular online news source that has rapidly come to dominate the local media landscape.
As America has gone, so has Johns Creek. And, it seems, vice versa.
At this particular council meeting in the town of 84,000 souls, Bodker and council members spend 57 minutes discussing Facebook, online trolls and “alternative facts”. They also discuss their own plans to publish a “Rumors” page that would live on the city’s website and dispel viral myths about their work.
The mayor and others on the council couched that page’s role as the city’s opportunity to dispel “alternative facts” – even though that sparked an immediate row that Johns Creek was setting up its own state-run media, like KNCA in North Korea and Tass in Russia.
One council member declared: “It starts sounding like a country where it’s not free, where they’ve got someone on street corners listening to what’s the scuttlebutt on the street.”
Another councilwoman argued: “I don’t want my government in there telling me what’s a rumor and what’s not. These things are real issues we’re addressing. First amendment and information cannot be abridged.”
Zaprowski defended the idea. “We have an issue with facts out there.”
The conversation at the council meeting continued, the mood tense. Finally, Zaprowski turns towards his real target: the Johns Creek Post.
The Post, as it’s referred to by residents, reaches 10,000 subscribers in town, and covers issues such as the number of traffic lights and misplaced U-turns that lead to longer drive times to Target. So far, so suburban. Johns Creek’s median income is more than $107,000 a year, according to census data, and these worries match the city’s upper-middle-class vibe. Its streets are crowded with high-end restaurants and upscale strip malls. It’s one of the richest towns in the state, which is where the town differs from large swaths of Georgia and the majority of America.
But the battles between politicians, the community and the media in Johns Creek echo those fought on the national level and can seem just as ugly.
Founded in 2014, the Post is a serious player in town and Jensen takes her role at the Post in earnest. She has used the Freedom of Information Act to get hundreds of documents from the mayor’s office, a request much bigger news outlets make of their elected officials regularly.
Her editor, Moosa, explained, “I think that’s what Johns Creek lacks. Serious conversation about the issues.”
One of the most recent requests Jensen has made asks for a file of all the deleted Facebook comments from Johns Creek’s city Facebook page. That’s limiting freedom of speech, she says, as she pads into her home from her back porch at the St Ives Country Club gated community to fetch the three-inch-thick folder.
In recent weeks, posts on her blog range from a poll on the best pizza in town to investigations of anonymous trolls on the website. Many of the recent stories take a critical look at the mayor’s policies.
But when Jensen is asked if she’s a journalist, she skirted the question. Deadpan, she said, “I’m all things to all people.”
Online supporters of the mayor have called the Post “fake news”, starting sometime in the fall of last year, according to a video compilation by the Post of those moments at city council meetings.
Bodker certainly thinks the publication is out to get him. “I think you would be intellectually dishonest if you read the Post and believed that they have no issues with me,” Bodker said in a phone interview.
But aside from the negative media coverage, as he sees it, there are also the trolls who have harassed him and his family. Zaprowski agrees.
That Monday night, Zaprowski asked the people of Johns Creek to reject the anonymous commenters on the blog who see Bodker as Johns Creek’s Kim Jong-un and criticize council members, including himself. “I ask us to stand up and say no more. We don’t accept it,” he demanded.
But Jensen has a bone to pick about the commenters Zaprowski is calling out. She gets out her laptop and pulls up screengrabs. A few days ago, Moosa confronted the councilman, telling him various anonymous commenters were posting from Zaprowski’s own IP address, posting “pro-Lenny Zaprowski comments”.
Jensen pulls up the various names from the IP address where Zaprowski posted with his name and email. Someone named Paul Francis posted through the same IP address on posts called, “Ask the Candidates: Why do you want to be a council person?” and another entitled, “Op-ed: What is Free Speech Really?” That raises the question of whether Zaprowski could be sock-puppeting: creating a fake online identity to boost himself.
It is a charge Zaprowski fiercely denies. A few hours after the council meeting, Councilman Zaprowski posted on Facebook, “Once again, I repeat that I have never posted anonymously. The IP address they posted is from my office where the internet is available to anyone who visits.”
All of this has an impact. Echoing national concerns that running for office in America in 2018 is simply too painful, Bodker – Johns Creek’s first and only mayor since it became a city in 2006 – has now announced he will not run for re-election.
“[Johns Creek] is a microcosm of [America] right now,” said Moosa, shrugging his shoulders.
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