I’m all for airing complaints if somebody sees an injustice; that’s the beauty of letters to the editor and freedom of the press.
But if you don’t have the courage of your convictions to sign your name to a letter, don’t bother sending it because we won’t bother printing it.
On my desk right now are two anonymous rants (which is the nicest way I can describe them) that start with the Chelsea Fair, but digress into a manifesto of complaints about the city in general.
“Shame on the Chelsea Fair Board!” begins one, then takes them to task for raising the admission price this year by $2 (for the first time in 10 years), and goes on to blame them for the mud that ensued after three days of heavy rain.
The writer even manages to make “You could find a parking space” sound like a bad thing.
Tell you what: The folks on the Fair Board go out of their way to ensure that people have a good experience at the fair, but even they don’t have the juice to control the weather.
The other writer complained about (among many other things) having to pay an admission charge to get into the fairgrounds to set up an exhibit a few hours before the fair officially opened.
“These volunteers should be armed with shotguns and if anyone dared to touch those gates without paying, shoot them on sight!” the letter stated.
Now that’s the kind of thing I would have wanted to look into as a reporter, but the letter was signed “Ashamed to Now Live in Traffic City USA, alias Chelsea, Mich.”
Hmm. Not much help there.
The first letter was e-mailed from a link on the newspaper's Web site, chelseastandard.com. The fields for name, e-mail, phone, address and locality all were left blank, so there’s no way to contact the writer.
The second was mailed, with no return address or other contact information on the envelope.
Despite the rambling inventory of how much better it was to live in Chelsea "50 years ago and up," perhaps my favorite aspect of the second letter was its admonition that we print it, which is below, verbatim:
“Pleasse print this. It needs to be said. Thank you. We will watch for our letter.”
You go right on watching for it, sweetheart, because this is as close as you’re going to get to seeing it in print.
I’m not doing this to be mean-spirited, and I’m certainly not trying to make fun of anybody.
But the newspaper can’t bring to light things that need to be changed unless somebody, somewhere, goes on the record and says, “There is a problem here, and it must stop!”
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2 comments:
I have always wondered why people write letters to the local newspaper instead of contacting the organization responsible. Your blog post is a good example of this, as is the article in today's paper Neighbors seek to curb traffic on busy street. Why would someone write you (no offense) instead of calling the Fair Board about admission prices, or contacting the city or police department about traffic? Perhaps if they had been trying to contact an official to no avail, or wanted to seek additional support from the community, then by all means call the paper. But unless the problem is with the newspaper itself, does anyone expect that complaining will fix anything? Boggles my mind.
On the other hand, I think your comment, "You go right on watching for it, sweetheart" contributes to the problem. It makes people feel defensive, which takes time and energy away from the process of solving the issues at hand.
I concur on the "sweetheart" comment. It's unnecessary, and it takes away from the rest of the post.
But yes, grievances like that should not be taken seriously unless they have names attached to them. This isn't a situation where the writer's safety relies on anonymity; the fair board isn't going to respond with violence.
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