Phill Kilgore of TableTop Game & Hobby in Overland Park, Kansas saw ICv2’s article about Sarah Palin and the Wasilla library (see “Palin Library Censorship Issue Raised”) and says he would rather ICv2 stay away from political articles. (An editorial response follows.)

I am a 20 year retailer that regularly reads your Website. Alliance Games recommended ICv2 as a good source of industry information, and it really is, I enjoy reading it. 

Please keep the political articles off of the Website; they don't have any place there. The McCain rep bashing D&D was funny to say the least, but please don't start posting all the political mud that is starting to sling. I don't come to your Website for political articles; I go there for industry news. Please keep to just the industry news.

Editor’s response:

Thanks for letting us know how you felt about it. 

We thought long and hard about running this before we did so.  We have a considerable librarian readership that we believe had the same level of interest in this situation that you did in the D&D coverage, and both Dungeons and Dragons and graphic novels have been the subject of library “challenges” (what they call it when somebody objects to material they offer) in the past.  We will admit that on free speech issues (which can come from either the right or the left), we tend to err on the side of keeping our readers informed.  We tried to be as evenhanded as possible, and reported that the whole thing ultimately came to very little, which is very different from what has been reported in some places (there was even a hoax list of banned books floating around the net).  We also gave it a fairly low profile to reflect the fact that it was of interest to a minority of our readership.

We certainly aren’t interested in doing political reporting—if our readers are like the general population, we risk offending 50% of them with any given story.  ICv2 has been around through past elections and ran no stories that had any connection to them, reflecting our general inclination to stay away from such stories.  But in this case we felt that it was directly related to the business we cover and because there was so much out there about this story (much of it incorrect), it was worth reporting.  We’ll continue to keep a very high threshold for publishing stories with a political component and will stay away from them in most cases.

--Ed.