ALetter to the Editor about Letters to the Editor
I penned this to the Richmond Times Dispatched after reading them whine about not enough letters. Obviously, they did not print this one.
RE: RTD wants your letters 3/30/2024
Like Glenwood Burley, I enjoy reading Letters to the Editor and occasionally submitting one of my own. I agree that they provide a glimpse of what is on the community's mind, and sometimes, they can be pretty insightful and thought-provoking. But the shortage of such letters is not a failing of the newspaper readership alone.
Consider that the Lee Enterprise Newspapers, such as the Richmond Times Dispatch and the Roanoke Times, have drastically cut the space they allocate for Letters to the Editor. At least once a week, the entire Opinion page is taken up by two opposing essays written by some "experts" and a giant political cartoon that appears to be there for the sole purpose of gobbling up space that could be used for letters.
By contrast, the Virginian-Pilot and other Tribune newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune, print letters daily. In 2023, I sent the Virginian-Pilot eight letters, and six were accepted. I sent more to the Richmond Times Dispatch because I live in this city. Of the eleven I submitted to RTD, only one appeared in the paper that year. The article suggests that if readers want to read more letters, they should write more. I suggest that if the editors of the Richmond Times Dispatch want to receive more letters, it should print more.
There is something so serendipitous about a cartoon pulled from a major newspaper network when the content of said cartoon references a part of the Civil War history omitted by historians to benefit the Southern ideology called the Lost Cause. So, when Gannett newspapers pulled a Doonesbury cartoon, all kinds of insinuations about censorial conspiracies hit social media. Read More