Taking Issue With Castanet Picture

I logged onto your site yesterday to receive the update on the teachers strike, and was met with your title page of "Gordon Campbell hates me" and other like statements. I cannot help but write about the total counter productive nature of these outrageous statements.

I have two children in the school district and the focus of teachers and administration has been to eradicate bullying and hate messages to students, and yet to my total outrage, it seems justified to use such statements in addressing a labour dispute for the teachers. If this is not a double standard I have not seen one.

If anyone showed up to a school with a button saying "my teacher hates me" it would be confiscated immediately, and so it should be, or what about students making buttons showing that they hate each other, how about that? Outrageous! Yet somehow we can use these words to describe a teachers dispute with the government.

I cannot believe the Castanet site would even post or promote hate messages, it is truly sad.

Jan Pfuetzner

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Dear Editor

I think this picture depicting buttons of "Gordon Campbell hates You" & "Gordon Campbell hates Me" is in very poor taste and without a doubt is a clear candidate for enforcement of legislation related to distributing Hate literature, and certainly the basis for a libel suit.

I sincerely hope the image of these buttons does not depict reality. If this is the method & message the Teacher's union is using to promote their agenda, then they have clearly crossed way over a line, and parents and teachers should be screaming mad at the Teacher's Union, especially if they are using their children to promote such a Hate message.

This is disgraceful! If this is a media idea by Castanet to create interest or sensationalize the topic, your designer who took this initiative
needs to be reprimanded and the image retracted without delay.

Looking forward to the explanation Castanet offers.

Rob Braun

[Editor's note: The picture in question ran with our story interviewing the local head of the Central Okanagan Teachers Association, Bob Shanks. Our reporter met with Mr. Shanks at the COTA office for the interview. The room in which the interview took place had a number of signs and other artficats from past labour disputes and elections. We chose to run a picture of some of those artifacts that we thought best represented the teachers' viewpoint of the current situation. As media, Castanet does not judge the merits of the artifacts, we leave that for our readers.]