Column: Why we don’t quash letters you don’t like
The concept of an open letters policy bothers some people, as does the kind of comments the law — and our letters policy — allows when it comes to political opinion and public officials.
I took a little heat from a very polite and well-spoken critic of the paper recently. He thought we should have invoked our policy barring mean-spirited personal attacks in our letters to the editor columns. He objected to a letter in which Vincent Novak, launching into an assault on Supervisor Jim Dougherty, attempted to suggest that his Wall Street ethics had something to do with local problems, from now-corrected building code violations at the FIT Center and the senior kitchen to the county crackdown on the town’s non-legal but de-facto public bathing beaches.
Mr. Novak accused Mr. Dougherty of “unethical conduct,” our critic said, so we should have muzzled him — or at least rejected or heavily edited his letter. (By the way, Mr. Novak never used the phrase “unethical conduct”; his charge was fuzzier than that, even though the implication is there.)
When I read his letter and prepared it for publication, I thought Mr. Novak’s accusation was, if not absurd, very weak. Wall Street is bad, so Mr. Dougherty is bad because he was a Wall Street lawyer, so a lot of screw ups and mistakes that have been made over the years in this town are his fault. Huh?
I also considered the letter a kind of white noise that is inevitable in politics. But my opinions were neither here nor there. We have an open letters policy. What people think is there for our readers to behold, including the good, the bad and the ugly sometimes. The thought never crossed my mind to withhold his letter.
We do not publish letters that are libelous or malicious. If Mr. Dougherty were not a public official, I might have had some serious second thoughts about Mr. Novak’s charge, as harmless as I essentially considered it. The law of libel for public figures allows wide leeway in the expressions of political opinion. For them, “malicious” means there has to have been a “wilful disregard of the truth.”
Try proving that in the case of a mere expression of opinion.
The Reporter is not going to apply a higher standard for libel or maliciousness than the law allows to protect public figures from outrageous critics. That would set a precedent requiring us to judge the merits and tone of every political opinion that letter writers express about any elected official or candidate. That would be a wee bit too fussy, opening the door to highly questionable decisions.
Do the Reporter’s readers really want the kind of paper that quashes public debate and discussion whenever the editor — whoever he or she might be — thinks somebody’s comments, claims or charges cross some ill-defined line of propriety? Where is that line?
How does the editor set it? I don’t think you, dear Reader, would like the kind of paper that sort of editing produces.
We’re in the business of providing information and fostering public comment. Better to stick to the law of the land when it comes to our letters policy and comments about elected officials.
The only element of our letters policy on which Mr. Novak might be stepping on thinning ice is the one saying we’ll cut letters submitted by someone who has already written the same thing repeatedly. In this particular case, Mr. Novak’s letter — while touching on things he’s covered before — had new content, including his wobbly attack on the supervisor. Otherwise, we do not edit letters or cut them down, except to apply our style to things like dates and addresses, to break long paragraphs and for spelling, punctuation and obvious grammatical errors.
Folks who are the friends of politicians should get used to the kind of stuff the critics will inevitably fling. If their charges are silly, the mud won’t stick. If their charges have merit, they’ll sting and possibly have an impact. So it goes.
Meanwhile, the Reporter is not going to make itself the censor of public debate. We’ll stick to our open letters policy because it’s easy to apply its standards without opening up a can of worms and we think it’s an asset for our readers that reflects a politically healthy, vibrant community.
