The Seattle Times published my letter to the editor that pointed out some of Molly Ivins' false and misleading statements in her columns that appeared in the Times. Although getting a letter published is better than not getting a letter published, it took the Times almost four weeks from the time I e-mailed the first version of the letter until it was published, during which time they chose to print more of Molly Ivins' fiction on their editorial page (see here, here and here). They also cut out some of the more important parts of my letter. Here is the letter as it appeared, with the unpublished portions in bold:
Molly Ivins accuses the Bush administration of lying to the public about the Iraq war, but her own recent columns contain statements of dubious veracity.i.e. they took out the line that most forcefully refuted one of Ivins' false statements, they present none of my sources and they took out the most important line in the whole letter -- that it shouldn't only be up to readers to find mistakes in the newspaper, it should be the responsibility of the newspaper itself to correct the falsehoods that they themselves print. Needless to say, they have neither retracted nor substantiated Ivins' columns, relegating my comments to the letters section, four weeks late, and given no more weight than the letter from some poor woman who agrees with Ivins that "Were we lied to? Of course we were." on the basis of having read this revelation on the Seattle Times editorial page.In her Oct. 27 column " 'Lies' don't quite describe the devious deceptions," Ivins alleged that "administration officials" "lied" by sending 500 "faked" letters to American newspapers "in the names of serving soldiers without their knowledge or permission."
I assume she is referring to an incident reported by the Gannett News Service. No "administration officials" were involved. A single battalion commander, acting on his own, and later rebuked by his superiors, wrote a letter about events under his command. The letter was voluntarily signed by some of his troops and sent to various hometown newspapers. Gannett's reporter interviewed several of the soldiers in question, but could not produce a single soldier who disputes the letter's contents. Exactly one soldier out of the 500 has complained that the letter was sent without his knowledge and even he agreed with the letter's contents.
In her Nov. 3 column, "PR can't gloss over the tragic reality of Iraq," Ivins claimed that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz "is the one who promised us this war would be a 'cakewalk.' " I find no evidence that Wolfowitz or any other administration official ever made such a statement. I suspect Ivins missourced an opinion piece by former Reagan official Kenneth Adelman. Indeed, in an essay for Fox News last February, Adelman complained that Wolfowitz and other administration officials had denounced and disparaged Adelman's view that the liberation of Iraq would be a 'cakewalk'.
The public's interest in a serious debate about Iraq is not served by columnists who make false and misleading statements. The Times should require Ivins either to produce evidence for her questionable allegations or to issue an explicit retraction.
As a friendly observation to the Times: you will earn more credibility among your readers if you devote as much attention to editing your syndicated columnists as you do the letters from readers who take the time to point out your columnists' mistakes and deceptions.
In the meantime, I propose the following motto for the Seattle Times editorial page: "We edit the facts out, and edit the fiction in!"
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 24, 2003 07:00 AMOk, Stefan. Your Molly Ivins fixation is beginning to scare me. I'm wondering if you scare her too.
(Or maybe she thinks you are trolling for a date.)
Posted by: King of Fools on November 24, 2003 08:38 AMStefan what I want to know is:
1) How many letters have you written to the Times?
2) Were they emails or mailed letters?
3) Did you tell them who you are in the letter?
For instance, a weblogger on the net?
Someone with a history of journalism, etc..?
4) Do you think they know now or knew prior about your weblog? and if so do you think they have read it?
5) Do you think Ivins has read your log and criticism of her? (If so you would think she would clean up her 'game' so to speak a bit, without acknowledging the criticisms formally.
Also, do you think your criticism of Ivins and the wacko left on the Middle East, Bush, the misquoted Senator or Congressman (I forget?), or the criticism of the public works projects like the stadium and the present one really got their attention?
YOU SEE while I think while we'd like to think it was all the formers, I bet it was the latter that really got their attention, if they in fact read the weblog or if you sent in letters to them.
Mike
PS You should put in an attempt to obtain a weekly OpEd column with them?
You could use the weblog and get people to call and write into the leftist wackos like the 1 reasonable guy who just published that in the Times, to try and persuade them.
The Seattle Times printed my letter about the same Molly Ivins column on Saturday right below Stefan's. I focused on Ted Kennedy's lies and Molly's reccomendation that we hand Iraq over to the UN, just as the UN has cut and run out of the country! (The limit of 200 words is very restraining.)
They print her column every week. Every week she passes fiction as fact. And almost every week she bashes President Bush. So she is in effect their full-time Bush basher. But they don't have a part-time fact checker for the editorial page!
Posted by: Ron Hebron on November 24, 2003 10:17 AMStefan-
I've had my fair share of Letters to the Editor adventures with the Indianapolis Star, and have discovered a few things about the workings of the paper that surprised me, mainly that the Editor of the Opinion Page works pretty independently with the letters, but works with a group- an Editorial Borad, in the case of the Star- with the usual dynamics of group decisionmaking: unresponsive, issues championed by one are defeated by the whole, etc.
It turns out that the Editor of the Star's Letters Page is a Republican with libertarian leanings, and gives me a lot of space as a result. As a Libertarian Party official, I learned this an put the candidates to work this fall, and we pretty much owned the Letters Page. We couldn't get much ink in other sections, but we had a letter from one of our candidates almost every day, and by election day outnumbered letters by Republicans and Democrats together by a 10-1 margin! Of course, they held a 15-1 margin in the regular columns...
One thing you might consider is offering to meet an editor for lunch. They always seem more receptive than I would expect (read: on the prowl for a free meal?) and while it usually helps to have an affiliation- political or other organization- being the blogger of some reknown as you are should be sufficient to earn a meeting. From there, well, you know what lobbyists do, and damned if they don't often get results.
I think they should probably keep their motto of "We misreport, you decide"
Posted by: BarCodeKing on November 25, 2003 07:52 AMHad the same experience with our local newspaper re a local columnists article on the USS Liberty incident. The newspaper also felt that it had to edit my letter, although in its original form it probably wasn't one-tenth the size of the column that contained the erroneous information. Newspapers can say what they want to about wanting input from their readers, but they really don't. Which is why so many of us have found other sources of news and opinion, such as blogs.
Posted by: Phil on December 1, 2003 08:17 AM