We’ve added a point to our letters guidelines. It now includes a prohibition against excessive personal comments about a person. Generally this is in regard to letters during election seasons about candidates.
This is tricky ground–some say personal characteristics say a lot about a candidate. That could be true sometimes. I recall an election back in Maryland when someone wrote a letter saying a particular candidate’s hygiene habits were so bad, when he took his socks off at night, they stood up. I was surprised the newspaper the letter appeared in ran it; it begs all kinds of questions, not least of which was, how did the writer know what the candidate’s socks did when he took them off ? Readers were left to suppose the writer was making his point by way of hyperbolic satire, but then that takes you back to the matter of why a newspaper would run a letter that flippant. Such a letter would certainly never run here. But if the writer really thought the candidate’s hygiene was perilously offensive, he could have found a more useful way to make the point–which then begs the question, again, of whether or not the letter should run. Is the person’s opinion accurate? Does he have a right to state it in print even if it were? If it were true, would it make a legitimate point about the candidate’s qualifications to hold office? To that last question, we can say perhaps. But there’s a lot to deal with in the broad consideration of the matter.
In recent weeks The Sentinel has received a couple of letters about candidates that approach similar consideration, and we have had to make hard decisions on whether or not they should run. In one case, delicate editorial surgery was done on the letter to get it to reasonability, eliminating the well-worded but clearly snarky comments touching on personal characteristics; we did that to keep the points the writer made that were plainly respectable opinions about the issues and the candidate’s stand on them. In the other case, the letter did not run, chiefly because it did not address issues or the candidate’s stand on them at all. It was purely about personal characteristics. Could we have run it if the candidate in question had a chance to respond to it? As it happened, circumstances made it impossible for the candidate to do so, so that was not an option. Given that we strive for equanimity in all voices, especially during election periods, to run the letter without balancing response would have been a violation of fairness. But even after all those considerations, the nature of the letter posed significant editorial problems.
Once we notified the writer of the letter that we would not run it, we were accused of our own bias. We were told we’d run letters that addressed personal characteristics before, though we’d have to see proof of that. We were accused of having a close personal relationship with the candidate, though that too is untrue. We take the view that the key concerns about candidates are competence, integrity, and stands on the issues. Letters might focus on those points.
