We take a great deal of pride in our editorial page.
Like all traditional publications, most of our pages are a one-way conversation. We print information. You, the reader, review it.
Our letters page is a little different. It’s your page. It’s the place where members of our community are welcome to address other members of the community. You provide the thoughts. We provide the ink.
As members of an industry rooted in the very principles of the First Amendment, we have an obligation to embrace free speech, whatever personal feelings any one letter or letter-writer might engender.
We are on record stating we print almost every letter we receive and we see no reason not to continue to do so. People have a right to say what’s on their minds. The rest of us have the right to choose not to read it and if we do read it, we have the right to make up our own minds about it.
That said, as this campaign season gets underway, this might be a good time to review some ground rules for our letter writers.
First and foremost, we reserve the right to edit for style and content anything submitted to us prior to publication.
We reserve the right to accept or reject anything we receive for any reason or no reason. We embrace the right to free speech, but that does not automatically require us to print everything sent to us just because it was sent to us.
Please, write your letters to the rest of us. If you have a personal ax to grind with any one organization or individual, cut out the middleman: send your letter to them.
Let’s stick to the issues. Ideas can be stupid. People thinking up the ideas are not.
You don’t like the idea, by all means, have at it; however, on our pages, no one is allowed to personally attack the letter writer.
It is always easy to write negatively but negativity only tells us what you’re against. Tell us what you’re for. If your candidate is the best, tell us why. Suffice it to say, your candidate can’t be the best solely on the strength of your belief the other guy is worse.
The other guy’s supporters think your guy is worse and they will be happy and motivated to tell us so after they read your broadside. Besides, flaming the candidate you’re against only obscures the issues.
Paranoia itself is not a fact. If you truly think the President or the Governor is the anti-Christ, and the rest of us need to wake up to that fact, we insist you write a reasoned letter explaining why you think so.
Finally, unless you are describing a megalomaniac who organized, planned and attempted the extermination of an entire race of people, Hitler references are not allowed. People have thrown Hitler around like a catchphrase in the last few years and that’s disturbing.
It diminishes and trivializes the man and we believe he should be remembered for who and what he was. Trivializing him trivializes the American blood spilled to stop him and we won’t have that here.
That said: game on.
