After today, there are only nine more letters to the editor sections until the Nov. 5 election. That means we’re going to be shutting off letters introducing new issues on Oct. 23, giving campaigns an edition to reply to any assertions made in the letters.
There has been some misunderstanding about what this means in the past. One candidate responded angrily to a letter that appeared in an issue before the primary, claiming we said there wouldn’t be any “personal attacks” allowed.
After reviewing every editorial published by The R-C since Nov. 1, 2023, those words never appeared in print.
What we said in May was that there wouldn’t be any “spring surprises,” which we interpret as bringing in new accusations or issues in a letter.
We disagree that criticizing an elected official for their behavior in office is a “personal attack.” Those folks work for all the residents of Douglas County, and it’s basically why the press is expressly included among the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.
That same candidate also publicly called out The R-C on his newsletter for not running a couple of the letters in what was, from our perspective, pretty clearly a letter-writing campaign.
To be clear, we didn’t run two letters. One from a person whose letter would not have appeared until after the election due to the once a month limit and another from someone who sent two letters in two days, only one of which was about the candidate, and didn’t include the required information in either.
Remember to always include your address and phone number with a letter, whatever the topic.
We’re aware that candidates often conduct letter-writing campaigns, though we’d prefer they didn’t. Some advice to those folks is to make sure you have someone in the wings to reply to an accusation and maybe don’t rub it in our noses that it’s happening. If we find out, we might not be as generous with our very limited space as we have been.
And the correct answer if you have an issue with a letter to the editor is to write one. As long as you’re honest with us, you’ll find us fairly easy to work with.
