Time to stop publishing “campaign” letters

October 29th, 2008 at 09:36am Linda Grist Cunningham

“I sent my candidate letter before the deadline, so why won’t you publish it?”

At least three people have asked me the question in the past week, so it’s time for some background and a broader explanation.

Until 15 years or so ago, the Rockford Register Star did not run campaign letters. Very few newspapers, and pretty much none our size or larger, run them. However, I believed that publishing campaign letters added a strong sense of community to our letters to the editor section, and so we began publishing them, and have ever since.

We have never promised publication of a campaign letter, and we have always run only a representative sampling. We use these guidelines as we select the ones for publication:

* As best as possible and based on the letters we actually receive, we attempt to run a representative sample of pro and con letters on each candidate or issue;

* We automatically reject obviously abusive letters, unsigned ones, ones to someone else and on which we are “copied;” ones that are too long; ones that simply do not make any sense; and, multiple letters from the same person;

* We actively watch for “organized letter campaign,” and believe me there are a lot of them and they are easy to spot. It’s usually pretty clear when a campaign or candidate has encouraged supporters to write letters. Our reason for publishing campaign letters in the first place is to let “regular folks” have a say in supporting (or not) a candidate or issue. Publishing letters is not supposed to be a handy way for organized campaigns to get free publicity. We may not spot them all, but over the years we have gotten pretty good at it.

* We cut off publication of letters on a particular candidate or issue when it appears that he/she/it has had plenty of published letters and they’re now taking away space from those who haven’t.

We’ve gotten a record number of campaign letters this season, and, frankly, far too many of them feel orchestrated. I suspect that will escalate in the Spring 2009 elections. It has crossed my mind that we ought to consider doing a special section just for letters — and charge each writer to have his or her letter published.

I am more and more inclined to go back to the old days when we refused to run them at all. We’ll see.

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