Letters to editors

Definition: Letters that readers send to newspapers for possible publication

Significance: Letters to the editor are a means of public participation in democracy; charges of censorship have been made when some letters have not been published

Letters to the editor were once a mainstay of Western newspaper content. With the modern development of the role of journalists as professional providers of public information and argumentation, letters have been relegated to a lesser role. This trend has restricted access to mediated public debate. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, early newspapers in Europe were seen as an extension of the public forum that had developed mainly with the proliferation of coffeehouses. Publications in Great Britain such as the Tattler, the Guardian, and the Spectator devoted themselves to soliciting and printing letters intended to be read aloud in these coffeehouse debates. Even in this early stage of journalism, letters to the editor were subject to the prejudices of editors. Joseph Addison, an editor of the Spectator, for example, saw himself as an arbiter of manners and morals. Thus, letters to the editor were censored or published according to the decision of the editor.

American Newspapers

During the period of the partisan press (the first of three phases in the development of American journalism), when newspapers were dedicated to particular parties or ideas, letters to the editor sometimes constituted most of the editorial content of a newspaper. From roughly 1750 to 1850, even editors would publish their personal comments as letters, a practice that continued into the twentieth century. Usually such a letter was anonymous or signed with a pseudonym. Social critics from Karl Marx to Alexis de Tocque- ville recognized the essential role these early publications of letters played in the development of modern democracies. Newspapers were the essential bearers and leaders of public opinion at a time when public opinion was dissolving, creating, and legitimizing governments.

In principle, individual partisan newspapers openly reflected the bias of the particular political parties that sponsored them. It was the partisan press collectively that created an open public forum that affirmed or denied civic arguments. Thus, while individual publishers selected and composed letters reflecting narrow, subjective points of view, a subscriber to several newspapers surveyed the broad scope of public debate. Consequently the meaning of censorship in this period is inverted. By exercising prejudice in selecting letters for publication, editors simultaneously participated in an overall process that provided the widest possible representation of ideas.

In the next phase of professional journalism in America, the period of the penny press, both the range of opinion and the amount of space allocated to letters were greatly restricted. The period of the penny press is named for the machines that made mass production of newspapers possible. The large, inexpensive daily newspapers put the smaller, more expensive partisan publications out of business. While on the one hand a kind of censorship of the marketplace thus occurred—as the few voices of the big city dailies replaced the many voices of small publishers—on the other hand, as newspapers became more affordable, more readers potentially gained access to public debate.

Public access was more apparent than real, however. Newspapers in the late nineteenth century developed the roles of reporters and editors as spokespersons for the public. They selected issues, conducted interviews with newsmakers, and provided analysis. The results were fewer publications and fewer voices speaking through those publications. The effects could be seen in a drastic reduction in the amount of space allocated to letters to the editor.

The period of the “objective” press began around 1900. Where newspapers primarily made up of letters were a conduit for public debate, professionally guided publications stood above the fray, synthesizing and critiquing the arguments of others and producing a kind of narrative of public debate. One of the effects of the growing dominance of this writing style was that letters to the editor, opinion columns, and editorials became the only places in newspapers in which opinions could be frankly expressed. Thus, in the twentieth century press, the style of objective news writing was to filter out opinions, and letters to the editor became one of the few outlets for opinion. Furthermore, since in the post-penny press environment letters pages were the only places where those who were not news-paper employees expressed themselves, letters to the editor became one of the last bastions of public opinion in the newspaper.

Letters to the editor pages expanded in the 1930’s. Time magazine first published volumes of correspondence from readers in 1934. These publications included letters that, because of space limitations, were never published in the magazine itself. There is no indication that reader mail has fallen off since the 1930’s. In the 1970’s The New York Times received approximately forty thousand letters a year. Time magazine had its letters double to approximately eighty thousand, as a result of the Watergate scandal, in 1973. In the 1990’s USA Today reported receiving more than twenty thousand letters annually. However, The National Enquirer apparently held the record, with a million letters a year.

Selection and Editing of Letters

The guiding principle of objectivity in twentieth century newspapers pervades even the letters to the editor page. Editors do not expect letter writers to be objective, although catering to the objectivity standard may make a letter more attractive to the editorial staff. Nowhere, however, is it practice to edit a letter to make it objective. The significant manifestation of the objectivity principle in publishing letters to the editor is in the attempt on the part of editors to tell what is commonly referred to as both sides of the story. Thus reporters interview people with opposing views, and letters page editors tend to select letters with opposing arguments to those found in news stories, editorials, or other letters.

While this dichotomous paradigm of mediating public debate would seem to ensure inclusion of opposing opinion, it also biases the process against opinions that do not fit the point-counterpoint narrative of a particular news theme. For example, if a newspaper were following a story about a bill before Congress to grant thirty million dollars to a group of armed rebels in a foreign country, and the debate were about whether the amount should be thirty million dollars, as the Republicans wish, or twenty million dollars—with guarantees that the money would be spent only on tents and uniforms instead of mines or guns—which is what the Democrats want, letters to the editor decrying any participation in another country’s affairs, or documenting the group’s atrocities, or arguing that the foreign country in question should be subjected to nuclear attack, might be judged too extreme to be published. Paradoxically, the objectivity principle, which arguably promotes access to public debate, restricts debate by biasing letters to antithetical positions.

Bibliography

Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978) shows how the objectivity principle governs the selection and editing of newspaper copy. Herbert J. Gans’s Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) provides statistics on letters received by news magazines and television news broadcasts. In The News at Any Cost (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985) Tom Goldstein gives a journalist’s account of how letters are processed by writers and editors. Daniel C. Hallin’s “The American News Media: A Critical Perspective,” in Critical Theory and Public Life, edited by J. Forester (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985) discusses the significance of the transition form newspapers as collections of opinions in the eighteenth century to newspapers governed by the scientific principles of objectivity. Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), deals with the development of modern public deliberation and gives a detailed account of letters to the editor in the earliest newspapers and their integral relationship to public debate. While the above authors focus on letters to the editor only to the extent that they represent the early stages in the evolution of the newspaper profession, Thomas C. Leonard includes later data in News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Statistics and discussion of letters to the editor are incorporated into this scholarly history of newspapers.