In recent months, I’ve been contacted by a number of readers, angry about some of the opinions printed in our newspaper. Readers angry about opinions voiced by this newspaper officially through my editorials are half the reason I love the job. Bring it on.
Generally, a reader who has an objection to another letter will write a rebuttal, addressing those points.
Fantastic. That’s how civil society debates policy.
But these new objections are to the opinions written by other readers appearing in our Letters to the Editor section and have come in the form of people demanding we simply no longer print such letters, because they disagree with the opinions they contain.
In most cases, I flat out reject the request but offer the aforementioned complainer the option to write their own letter rebutting the opinion. Some do, some ignore me, but a handful reiterate that such “harmful” and “dangerous” opinions should not be printed because they disagree.
I’ve been at this job long enough to notice that these objections to others’ views generally begin in the first few months of a new presidential administration and are voiced by members of the red team or the blue team whose captain just took over the White House.
Four years ago, the red team wanted to silence foes. Now the blue team does.
Newspapers are antithetical to censorship. Newspapers exist as we do today because of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, sine qua non. It protects our ability to print and we protect our readers’ ability to have their opinions published.
We provide a forum in our Letters to the Editor section for readers sometimes with wildly differing opinions to voice their views on local issues, policy, politics, culture and social trends.
Some readers mistakenly believe we wholly support and vigorously defend every view and opinion published on Page 4A in our newspaper. We absolutely don’t. We are just a forum for those views to be heard. Sometimes we know letters we print are controversial and will generate a response from members of public, which is why we encourage rebuttals — civil discourse benefits public debate.
Bashing members of the other team as a whole isn’t productive [“All Democrats are …” or “The Republicans all believe …”] and there is a vast difference in ideologies even in the same party.
When a letter writer voices opinions based on factual errors or with data we find lacking or questionable, we ask them to provide sources to prove their point. If they can’t, their letter goes on hold indefinitely. I have a stack of such letters.
If they can prove their point or their view is wholly just opinion, then there is no reason not to print.
This urge to silence rather than hear is a troublesome and illiberal violation of republican liberal democracy. When an organization hosts a problematic presenter, a college invites a controversial speaker or an official writes a troublesome op-ed, opponents can either ignore it because it’s a one-off or engage, offer well-reasoned, logical rebuttals, challenge the speaker or author to defend their positions and effectively drown out bad ideas with reason, hard questions and better ideas.
The lazier process is to agitate the institution to cancel the speaker, de-platform the offender or censor the letter-writer. The answer to problematic speech is not censorship, but more speech.
The problem with censoring objectionable ideas is that they do not go away, they simply find another platform or another venue.
Keep your friends’ ideas close, but your enemies’ opinions closer. Keep opposing opinions on the same social media platform, or in the same newspaper, at the same public forum or council meeting or bulletin board — maybe just so you can keep an eye on the crazy. If bizarro comments cross a line into dangerous absurdity, others keeping an eye on it can point out the illogical, irrational garbage, rebut with facts and eviscerate the nonsense.
It also makes us better logicians as we learn how to craft arguments and find references and data we can use when we encounter nonsense ideas elsewhere.
Kicked into the shadows, in the darkness on other platforms, crazy begets crazy, conspiracies fester and we don’t see what the madmen are getting up to.
The old adage is, “The sun never set on the British Empire because God doesn’t trust the English in the dark.” Be the light.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
