This editorial is about letters to the editor, but it’s really about a lot more.
At The New Era, we love letters to the editor.
We appreciate and welcome them because they provide perspective from members of the community besides ourselves – usually the editor. Our newspaper opinion page is a forum for the community to discuss issues and we want people – even those who aren’t regular readers of the newspaper – to feel free to express their opinions.
True, there are some rules, which are listed in the box below, but those are in place to maintain civility, keep the focus on issues that are of community interest and keep us all out of legal jeopardy.
It’s no secret that social media is full of ill-conceived, knee-jerk, rude, short-on-the-facts and often potentially libelous content. That’s not where we want to go. Newspapers are careful, not only for their own credibility’s sake, but because we’re a more traditional form of media with a long history of defending ourselves, (speaking generally) against libel.
Getting back to submitting letters: Occasionally, people tell us that they were surprised we ran their letter. They shouldn’t have been. The only reasons we’ve ever not run a letter is because it somehow failed to comply with the rules below, a writer contacted us and asked us to chuck it, or because we had an issue that we needed to talk to the writer about and we couldn’t reach them.
The later is one of the reasons we’re addressing this, now.
Currently, we have three letters that are lacking a name or phone number or both – which are requirements for publication.
In one case, the writer brought the letter in and our staffer at the counter – whose name will go unmentioned because he’s the editor – failed to notice that it had no name. But we haven’t been able to locate the writer, so the letter sits “gathering dust” until we hear from her.
In another, the writer has made some statements we’d like to discuss, but with no phone number, we’re up a creek. We’ve tried and we can’t find him. Most people don’t have home phones listed in the phone book any more and with cellphones, it’s like everybody has an unlisted number.
We can try other means, but they often are inefficient or ineffective, which means we’re kind of up a creek if we don’t have your information.
That’s the reason why we require writers to include their true name and their phone number when they submit a letter. (On rare occasion we have made exceptions if we are sure a letter is genuine and we know who the writer is, but those are certainly not the rule. If we have any doubts, it doesn’t go.)
It’s important that the community hears from you. Many people in Sweet Home who really pay attention to local public affairs read this newspaper.
Right now, Sweet Home has more issues floating about, which people are discussing with us and with others, than we can remember in the last 20 years.
We have a city manager vacancy (page 13). We have city staffers and councilors who want to buy the old U.S. Forest Service building for a new City Hall (page 5). The chair of our Parks Board has been dismissed (page 1). The council has decided to spend more than $10,000 on a plan to develop Sankey Park (page 12).
There are also the questions of what to do with the Weyerhaeuser mill site and Knife River properties, poverty, school issues, just to name a few. Not to mention the November elections, which are starting to take on some abnormal significance, given all these other issues.
A big topic on which our staff has heard a lot of talk from readers – on the street or over the counter or the phone – has been the City Council’s perceived lack of engagement in actual city life. Most recently, its been pointed out to us by multiple community members that not one councilor attended either the SHEDG workshop on the Knife River property on June 23 or the Share Fair focusing on multiple projects that will affect Sweet Home’s economy and its residents, held June 29.
As we started to say above, an ideal opinion page is a robust exchange of views, expressed civilly, about matters of interest to readers.
We live in a world of many distractions, and a lot of people don’t spend much time thinking about who’s running their lives until they get bitten by government policy or procedures in some fashion. We are surrounded by other issues – economic, social, public trust, etc. and it’s often good to hear what other people are thinking, if for no other reason than to prompt us to reassess our own positions.
We occasionally hear from people who complain about something going on in the community, but when I suggest that they write a letter, they hesitate because they’re concerned about … backlash from the community, harassment from government officials – something.
Without discounting those concerns, we have to say that in a combined 60-plus years in the newspaper business, none of us have heard of a serious incidence of that occurring.
Most people seem to respect the newspaper opinion page as a legitimate, structured forum for concerns and criticism that are part of our democratic process. If there was no way to voice opinion, that process wouldn’t work very well. We might as well all kowtow to a dictatorship because we wouldn’t have the free expression necessary to formulate our views and to vote our consciences.
One more thing: If the almost unthinkable were to happen and a letter writer were to actually experience something like that, do you think the newspaper would sit idly and watch it happen?
Freedom of expression is a very serious issue to every legitimate newspaper in the United States. If we’re talking about trigger points, that’s near the top of the list.
Like we said, there are a lot of big issues circulating in our community right now. We want to hear your opinions.
Tell us what you think, but be sure to let us know who you are and how to find you.