Media Musings: Letters to the editor a vital forum
You may be an avid reader of letters to editors and even take up your own pen now and then to tell the readers your thoughts on matters great and small. It is a old and honored art and one that may pass away in the digital age. Hopefully, that’s just one of my own fears as the digital age unfolds ever more rapidly to change every form of communication.
Letters don’t pour into newsrooms as often as editors would hope.
They try and spark the readership to make their own opinions by writing editorials that reflect an editorial board or simply the thoughts of the editor alone.
At the vaunted New York Times, the editorial writers are on a floor away from the din of the paper’s giant newsroom. There, in what must be a romantic place that continues the history of the days when great dailies stalked the land, writers do research, hold serious discussions, and search for a position consistent with the paper’s liberal political position. To show how really independent the paper is from the owners, one of its legendary publishers had to write letters to the paper sometimes, so the story goes, under a pseudonym, to get his point across.
The point of most editorials is quite important. They seek to cause politicians and other power brokers to pause and perhaps reflect on what they think is marvelous public policy. Sometimes the editorials are powerful enough to cause great discomfort to a public agency and its leadership.
For the past year, The Tennessean has attempted to give an entire page every Sunday to conservatives. Tim Chavez wrote columns and then published letters representing conservatives, giving them, as I understand the logic, a place for their voices in what is considered a liberal paper editorially.
The paper has now changed course and is running with a new approach, where an issue is framed and a liberal and conservative have equal space to present their positions. Chavez wrote an insightful column about how there’s no conservative monolith and there all conservatives all over the political spectrum called the right. It’s true as well among liberals, who often agree with conservative positions depending on the issue.
What the Sunday page did become was very predictable, to the point of being bereft of new ideas or argumentation. It became predictable and newspapers should loathe to end up at that point in any section of a good newspaper.
But one important part of the experiment, hopefully, won’t be lost: local voices lifting up opinion. Here, there is a troubling history for The Tennessean. When it lost Ray Waddle as arguably one of the best religion editors and writers in the nation, the section, now more important than ever to such an increasingly diverse city, became filled with wire service copy.
Now wire service copy is appearing in the forum concept replacing the “conservative” page. Hopefully, that’s not going to be sustained. It’s a rather daunting task for Chavez, granted, but there is really a wealth of professionals in all orbits of the city to give their thoughts on cloning or education or medicine. But the trick will be to keep the letters coming into the forum from across the political spectrum and that won’t be easy because people who are liberal and conservative often don’t hold differing opinions about solutions to tough problems.
Letters give voice to fools and geniuses, scoundrels and saints.
They are not only worthy of your time — granted it is your most limited resource – but of your mind, which forms opinions that can really change matters, both serious and silly.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)