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"Surely you have the power to not reply to certain messages?"

Of course I do. And I do frequently.

The problem is that the nets are best able to spread complete
misinformation even faster than they can spread real information. If
something is stated once in error -- like the person who thought the
deadline was the 19th rather than the 11th -- others pick it up and
within a matter of a day or two, there are 10,000 people all with the
same wrong information, and if you go back to them to correct it later,
they say, "Well, no, that's not what I heard," even though they may not
be able to remember where they got that info from.

On the nets, the line between "speculation" and "fact" is very
blurry on the best of days. My feeling has always been that in that
kind of situation, you put out the facts as best you can, on the theory
that the folks interested in the discussion are sharp enough to suss
out the truth, and those not interested in it wil simply not bother to
read the threads.

Also, bear in mind that there was a request put out to email
bomb me by people concerned about Claudia's situation. A request put
out *by* Claudia and her people. Now, I can either spend ten thousand
hours a day responding to each one of those in email, or by public
messages put a lot of those concerns to rest and save a fair amount of
hassle when I'm *trying* to put on a show here.

jms