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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Relevance the key to political letters
By Don PorterI must ad
mit I take a certain amount of comfort in ritual when it comes to annual news cycles. Election season, particularly, is one of those rituals that I love and hate in about equal parts. It brings out the best and worst in people -- candidates, their supporters and detractors -- and always offers up something unexpected along the way.
One of the customs we have on these opinion pages -- as well as our online component, www.standard.net -- is that we announce prior to elections what type of political letters we won't publish, as well as setting cut-off dates for letters prior to an election in order to allow us the time to verify their authorship, to get them published and to allow for candidates' rebuttal letters in extreme circumstances.
In a perfect world, all of this would be straightforward and easy to understand. But despite my best efforts, it never is. And the two guidelines for political letters that are the source of much grumbling each year are the following:
1. Contents must be discussions of relevant political issues and should avoid personal attack.
2. No letters of endorsement or simple praise of qualifications and worth of candidates will be run.
When I read them, they appear pretty clear to me. First, letters should deal with issues. If you accomplish that, it's easy to avoid the "personal attack" part.
No. 2 is even stickier for lots of people. We don't want to publish letters that are nothing but endorsements -- "I'm supporting Candidate A because he's a kind man and will do good things for my town." That doesn't really say anything, does it?
Furthermore, we don't want letters that simply -- or maybe I should say only -- praise a candidate's qualifications or worth: "I plan to vote for Candidate B because she has been a member of the planning commission/city council/mosquito abatement board for many years now and thoroughly understands the operations of government." Good for Candidate B, but that letter is absent a discussion of issues, as well.
That said, there is a loophole I've always honored. If you send in a political letter and actually discuss a "relevant political issue" -- and who gets to decide what's relevant? That's right: me, because, as President Bush would say, I'm the decider -- I'll run it. Or at least most of it, since sometimes we have to trim letters for length, edit them for grammar or to be consistent with basic newspaper style.
So now that you know how to get a political letter into print, there's one more thing to remember: Get it here on time. I usually close off letters a week before the primary election, and a week prior to the general election. That way, we'll have the time to verify each letter's authorship and schedule it for publication prior to the election. I like to be able to run the last political letter a couple of days in advance of the election so that if the letter makes an accusation about a candidate that is factually incorrect, that candidate will have time to write a response to that specific allegation and we'll have time to publish it before election day.
That means you letter writers out there are on notice: The deadline for letters leading up to the Sept. 11 primary is 5 p.m. on Sept. 4. (If you e-mail it to me and the time on the e-mail reads 5:01 p.m. that day, it won't be considered; I have to draw the line somewhere.) And for letters in the run-up to the Nov. 6 general election, the deadline will be Oct. 30 at 5 p.m.
I look forward to reading your letters, and hearing what you have to say about the candidates -- or even about the way I do my job.
Porter is the Standard-Examiner's editorial page editor. E-mail him at dporter@standard.net, or call him weekdays at 625-4205.
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