The New York Times article that so many thought was “bad” continues to spawn new coverage! This past Monday the Keene Sentinel ran a front page feature piece on the flurry of news stories focusing on Keene liberty activism and Free Keene. Thanks to reporter Ella Nilsen for the story:
It’s been more than a year since the city of Keene and a local group of activists first fought over downtown parking meters, yet the story lives on.
The saga of the activists, dubbed “Robin Hooders,” has played out in the national media on “Good Morning America,” the Huffington Post, and, most recently, the front page of The New York Times. In a few weeks, Robin Hooding and a more recent dispute over chalking will be highlighted on the Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.”
Throughout all of this, city officials have stayed mostly silent. They say they don’t want to fan the flames of national attention on these issues.
But just as chalking and “Robin Hooding” have thrust Keene into the national spotlight, city officials say these issues have put an important community debate about free speech front and center.
“I think it’s focused everybody’s attention,” said Mayor Kendall W. Lane in a recent interview. “It certainly has made everybody much more conscious and much more willing to look at what are the limits to the First Amendment and how they should be applied.”
City officials just don’t want to add to any media spectacle in the process, they said.
A media history
It all started with Robin Hooding, a practice by some bloggers on the libertarian-leaning Free Keene website. The men and women fill parking meters before they expire and city parking enforcement officers can write tickets.
But while the bloggers filled meters, city parking officers also alleged the bloggers were harassing them.
In December, Cheshire County Superior Court Judge John C. Kissinger Jr. dismissed two cases the city brought against the “Robin Hooders,” asking for a 30-foot barrier between the officers and the bloggers. The city has since appealed to the N.H. Supreme Court.
In his decision, Kissinger wrote that imposing the barrier on Free Keene members would violate their First Amendment rights to free speech.
When the calls from the national media first came in about Robin Hooding, city officials agreed to appear on a few national reports. City Manager John A. MacLean had a short spot on a 2013 “Good Morning America” segment.
“We were making the assumption that people would be fair and there were multiple sides to the issue,” Lane said. “Once we got into it, we quickly realized that they were trying to portray this as the terrible city against the common people that were trying to stand up for their rights.”
Lane calls the “Good Morning America” segment “unfortunate.”
“They really didn’t understand what the real issue was,” he said. “We decided at that point that we weren’t going to pursue this line of debate, that it was not productive.”
MacLean said the GMA version of the Robin Hooding issue was an easy storyline to portray: city hall fighting against the common people.
“They get this attention because it appears the press is enamored with that kind of story,” MacLean said. “In reality, it has nothing to do with the city of Keene other than it’s the Petri dish for this group of people.”
But sometimes, the flurry of media can be hard to ignore.
“How many times can we explain that some behaviors are difficult to deal with … while also trying to deal with a community that also feels victimized by bad behavior?” MacLean said.
A new controversy
While the parking meter issue has calmed for the time being, chalking downtown streets and Central Square has recently become more prominent.
Lane calls chalking “the antic du jour.”
In recent weeks, everything from smiley faces to murals to anarchy symbols have been chalked downtown. The increase, as well as two violent outbursts related to it, prompted City Councilor Randy L. Filiault to propose an ordinance that could ban chalking and other graffiti in Keene.
When “Colbert Report” producers came to the city two weeks ago to film a segment on Robin Hooding, they weren’t even aware of the chalking situation, according to Free Keene blogger Ian Freeman.
“They did tell us they were inspired by the New York Times piece that came out,” Freeman said. “They sort of stumbled into the chalking war.”
Freeman says he recognizes his group will most likely be lampooned on the “Colbert” segment, but as long as it gets them airtime, he’s fine with that.
“It could be viral, who knows,” he said. “I’m grateful for the attention, even if they’re going to make fun of me.”
Freeman said his group’s main goal is to inspire other activists to move to New Hampshire. In that way, he says, the national media attention on Keene is invaluable.
“I was told that every minute of time on ‘Good Morning America’ is worth $2 million,” Freeman said.
Filiault says he reluctantly agreed to appear on the “Colbert Report” segment. He said he initially didn’t want to add to the “negative publicity the Free Keeners seem to draw into Keene.”
But after speaking to one of the show’s producers, Filiault decided he wanted to give an opposing point of view.
During filming, he said the producers asked him some serious questions about the graffiti ordinance he recently proposed. But they also asked questions like, “If this ordinance passes, are you telling us there will not be tanks in the streets like we heard?”
Lane says he believes the chalking controversy will, too, come to an end.
“It, too, will die out as long as we don’t overreact and try to do something foolish,” Lane said. And he says he believes the community should focus on other issues.
“I worry about the drug dealing more than I do about chalking,” Lane said.
Debates playing out in Keene
When asked why Keene has become the stage for free speech arguments to play out, both Lane and MacLean say they believe it’s because the city is seen as more tolerant and progressive than other areas of New Hampshire.
“It’s a fairly laid-back community,” Lane said. “I think this community is pretty forgiving and is not hostile to new ideas and new groups; we’ve long had a reputation of being a progressive community.”
Lane says he thinks other parts of the state have always viewed Keene as being more progressive and a little different, but he doesn’t think the addition of the Free Keene bloggers into the mix has made that any more pronounced. Instead, he says, the group is part of a “bigger picture of the community.”
But as the Free State project — a movement to get 20,000 liberty activists to move to New Hampshire — grows, Lane said city officials have received calls from other cities asking for advice on how to approach similar situations with liberty activists.
“It’s places like Keene where these things are starting to play out,” MacLean said. “Even though it’s sensational as well, I think there’s a great amount of interest in these societal changes.”
But Freeman said the values his group is fighting for are nothing new or novel.
“There’s been a lot of free speech issues over the years,” Freeman said. “This is not a new discussion at all. There have always been people that want to restrict the free speech of others.”
Freeman says he doesn’t think his group is necessarily the largest liberty activist group in the state right now; there’s a larger group in Manchester. But Free Keene is very well-known, he says.
It’s sometimes a challenge to balance city governance with dealing with activists, but Lane said he thinks it’s helped focus people’s attention on an important topic.
“I think a lot of us agree that we would like government to not be intrusive in our daily lives and we would like government to be smaller,” Lane said. “I think this debate has helped generate attention to … what is the proper role of government and to what extent do we apply that.”
“We try not to be restrictive,” he added. “We try not to be intrusive.”
