There’s A Lot Of Ways Letters Don’t Get Printed

On the morning after this month’s primary election, an opponent of the Pacific Science Center proposal called one of Spokane’s more popular radio talk shows. Among other things, he said The Spokesman-Review failed to investigate and publicize the costs of the proposal, which narrowly lost.

“We had at least 20 to 25 editorials that went into The Spokesman-Review that were explaining some of these costs. Not one was printed, not one editorial,” Jonathan Swanstrom Sr. told KXLY’s Mike Fitzsimmons. Swanstrom said he personally had read three of the letters to the editor before they were sent in.

The belief that letters are selected for publication according to whether they agree with The Spokesman-Review’s own editorial stand on issues is common, even though a count of printed letters usually contradicts it. Like most newspapers, we find that letter-writers are more inclined to set us straight than to second us.

In this case, though, there was no contradiction. In the two weeks preceding the election, we published 17 letters in favor of the science center (which our editorial board endorsed) to three against - 58 column inches to nine.

Gulp.

The perception that we might have stacked the letters in favor of a cause we supported was a concern.

At Managing Editor Scott Sines’ request, letters clerk Aimee Walter pulled her files of unused letters, looking for those that addressed the Pacific Science Center. She found 19 - 12 supporting the proposal, six opposing it and one from an Elmer City, Wash., reader who said he would be for the center if he lived in Spokane but criticized the proponents for a misleading campaign.

Of the six unprinted “anti” letters, four failed to meet published criteria for letters to the editor: one was 50 words over the 250-word limit, one included no telephone number where the writer could be reached for verification and two were anonymous. The other two arrived too late to be processed for publication on Sunday, the last day for printing election-related letters.

But six letters is a far cry from the 20 to 25 that Swanstrom mentioned on the air, so I called him for details.

Swanstrom said his estimate was based mostly on conversations he’d had with other foes who told him over the past three months that they sent letters which weren’t printed. Walter retains such letters for only a month and without names of the people who talked to Swanstrom I was at a dead end.

But Swanstrom did arrange to have copies of the three letters he’d read faxed to me. All had been sent in the week preceding the election, but only one was among those in our file of unused letters and that one had been received too late.

Both of the other letters met the paper’s criteria, though.

What happened to them? Frankly, we can’t say. In the crushing paper flow that swamps a newsroom, individual documents can and do get misdirected or misplaced. Ironically, Walter had jotted “needed” on several of the unused letters, indicating she was on the lookout for anti-science center letters to give the forum more balance.

We can, of course, stress our commitment to maintaining the letters section as an impartial forum for public dialogue. After all, it’s one of the most heavily read pages in the paper and preserving its credibility is not only in the public interest but in our self-interest too.

And we can, when the Nov. 7 general election draws nearer, avoid confusion over timeliness by reminding readers from time to time of the deadlines for election-related letters.

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