Don’t take it so hard. BTW, do you ever get letters that say, “I dare you to print this letter!” or something similar?
I don’t think your situation is unique to Carson City. I live in a much bigger city and the paper here also seems to print an inordinate number of letters from (usually right-wing) cranks with too much time on their hands. Read the letters to the editor section of the Spokane Spokesman-Review for a month and I can guarantee you’ll come across on fairly regular basis:
[ol]
[li]Anti-gun control letters complaining about how the eeevil liberals in the media and the “guvmen’t” are conspiring to take away our guns as a part of their plan for a global totalitarian state.[/li][li]Letters that harp on how Bill Clinton is responsible for this country’s ills and warning us that Hillary (with the aid of the liberal media) will do more of the same.[/li][li]A letter calling the very Republican Spokesman-Review or the “Socialist Review.”[/li][li]Scores of anti-abortion letters.[/li][li]Apropos of nothing letters from creationists arguing that evolution is responsible for the world’s ills followed by a series of letters defending evolution and often advocating atheism which are in turn followed by fundie rebuttals and then more pro-evolution/atheist counter-arguments, etc. (This may not seem so bad but I’ve seen this argument cycle so many times that it’s long become tiresome.)[/li][li]The typical “liberals (usually people from Seattle, San Francisco, LA, New York, Boston, or DC) hate America, want to corrupt our youth, and are deliberately undermining the war on terror because they want the Islamofacists to win” letter.[/li][/ol]
Granted, well-written and intelligently argued letters are also printed but they seem to be fighting the aforementioned crank-blasts for attention. And just think what the letters that weren’t good enough to print are like [shudder].
What about Phil Lashio, Amanda Huggenkiss, or Haywood Jablowmee?
Back in high school, I was on the paper. As part of a Career Day thing (if I remember correctly), we went to the Spokesman-Review building for a behind-the-scenes tour. I, being my sneaky, underhanded self, promptly split myself off from the rest and went to visit the Letters to the Editor folks.
Let me tell you, man… you ain’t seen NOTHING like what they DON’T print. Spokane may not have a monopoly on nutjobs, but we’re breeding 'em fast up here. sigh
Yes. We usually do, too, misspellings and all so that people know how stupid they are.
We actually don’t get too many anti-abortion letters. We get too many anti-contraception letters, though, because people seem to have a problem differentiating between the two. We also get a lot of those Clinton conspiracy letters. But everything else is just kinda a toss-up. We do get a lot of people bitching about young’ns, but you expect that from a high retirement area like this.
Sofaspud - We print almost everything we get, unless it violates the once a month policy or is downright offensive (as in, the guy who writes in about Our Jew Overlords or people who say that all Wiccans are rotting in hell…regardless of whether or not we agree with them, that’s really just crossing the line). Also, it has to connect with this area, so people writing in from Florida about some national problem don’t get printed, but locals do. If someone from Florida writes in about something going on in Carson (as in, they have a relative there), that’s a different story.
I think that’s the same policy the Review up here follows; it’s been a while since high school. But the letters section is still only one or two pages, with a huge freakin’ editorial cartoon taking up 1/3 the real estate (what happened to decent editorial cartoonists, by the way?), so there’s still a lot that goes unpublished even if it otherwise qualifies (or so I assume, because the amount of letters they get could fill the whole paper if they published them ALL, heh).
Anyway, I was referring mostly to the REALLY crazy stuff – conspiracy theories, expletive-laden diatribes against the current mayor, that sort of thing. Funny reads, most of them. But I’d hate the ‘dealing with the psychos’ part of your job, even if I enjoyed reading their, um, theories.
We get people from all over the globe writing in because our articles, often times, get put on specific newswires; for instance, if one of our stringers writes a column about legalizing marijuana, it’ll get put on the Marijuana News Wire (I think that’s what it’s called). A lot of activists subscribe to this sort of thing so we’ll get letters from around the country about whatever. We generally don’t publish out of state letters unless they’re really good and directly pertain to the area.
Sofaspud - We generally do run most letters we get, assuming I am able to get them into the system. People who hand-write letters in handwriting I cannot read will not get published, for instance. Most people who e-mail letters do get published. There are various reasons some don’t get published but generally if it’s legible and we can confirm it, it goes in the paper.
I have a friend who is a reporter for a small paper in NJ, and they had a firestorm when they ran a letter from one of the local loons without editing. They got accused of making this fool look bad by running his letter as is.
Do you have headlines on your letters? Do you have locally contributed OpEd pieces? If so, who writes them? I ask because a bunch of years ago, during a school funding crisis, I wrote an OpEd piece advocating balancing the budget by laying off students. I called it “A Modest Proposal for Our Schools” but the headline writer, being an illiterate, changed it into something innocuous. Half the people thought I was serious. :eek:
We generally write our own headlines on our columns, guest columns and letters to the editor, only because the people who try to write them themselves are idiots and know nothing about writing heds.
We let our reporters do their own heds, though. Which means every time my column runs it’s a hed I wrote. Almost as cool as having my own article in the paper, honestly.
And damnit! I was so hoping that was a genuine letter.
You know, I just posted here, but I’ve gotta add some vitriol here.
To the asshole kid who was driving recklessly: Thanks a lot, asshole. Now, because of you, I have to write an obituary for your 16-year-old friend. She died after two days of suffering in the hospital and I hope you’re rotting in hell right now.
Spokane may not have a monopoly on nutjobs, but we’re breeding 'em fast up here. sigh