There's no slander on OurConcord.com

I won't go into this in any detail, but the spouse of an elected official in Concord has requested that I "stop slandering" certain elected officials "in the paper or your blog."
Just so we are all clear here, since this spouse is probably not alone, I have not published a single thing that would be considered "slander" by its legal or perceived definitions.
Dictionary.com describes "slander" as "a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report." The legal definition is as follows: "defamation of a person by unprivileged oral communication made to a third party ..."
My pointed criticisms and opinions are based on pure facts, facts which I have either gathered myself, witnessed in documents, or witnessed myself. They have been, so far, irrefutable.
OurConcord.com is both a blog and a news site and, accordingly, will have opinions, analysis, and straight news stories. It is just one person, with occasional submissions from others. However, I'm careful to not print anything that I'm not completely sure of or have referenced from something that can be sourced. If I do make a mistake, I pull it from the page and offer a correction.
The Concord Monitor does not allow "slanderous" statements to be published in its newspaper. You can ask the editors over there for yourself. As regular readers of this site know, I have been critical in the past of their heavy editing, for lack of a better term. So, even suggesting that anything they have published on my behalf is slandering is, well, a little loopy. Lighten up folks.

Over the years of being both a journalist and broadcaster, I have been mystified that readers (and listeners) can't move beyond the difference between news and opinion. Admittedly, with blogs and the Internet, it gets a bit complicated. And reporters, like other human beings, do have biases and motivations that get them to write and report a certain way. Trust me when I say that the good ones work really hard to subdue this instinct. We do the best we can even if it is hard.
But I have found that readers don't always know what they are talking about when it comes to what they are reading, especially terminology. I don't know if it is lack of media education or they just don't care or whatever. But there is a difference between "slander" and "opinion" ... there is a difference between "criticism" and "attack" ... there is a difference between "analysis" and "news." Again, the Internet complicates things, especially when compared to the grand old days of having an afternoon paper with all the day's news delivered to your door (often by kids like me).
In the case of some of the things I write about here, it can be a mix of things. But it is not, and has never been, slander.
If the spouses of elected officials can't handle the criticism, they have some choices. They can ignore this site and others, if they like. They can educate themselves about media literacy and interact in a sensible manner. Or, they can go back and tell their spouses that maybe, just maybe, those with pointed criticism, backed up by facts, might have some reasonable points. Or maybe the elected officials should go back and reexamine what they are doing ... because, maybe, their plans are indeed wrong or not the best.
We live in the United States of America. We have a Bill of Rights that allows us the freedom to speak. Some of us do more than that - we say what we feel and what we know to be true. If you can't take others analyzing important public policy positions in a critical manner, especially when tens of millions of dollars are at stake, then your spouses shouldn't be in the positions they are in. Don't immediately talk down to voters, taxpayers, parents and constituents as if we are children because you don't like what we are saying. Some of us have children. Some of us, in some cases, really do know better than you do about what's best for our families and our pocketbooks.
Lead or get out of the way. Don't lecture us.