When a United States senator takes out a full-page ad in the local paper to get his message out, that gets readers’ attention.
Several readers asked me about the ad by Sen. Richard Burr in last Sunday’s paper reprinting a letter to the editor he had submitted to The News & Observer. The paper had published an edited version of the letter on June 14, but the editing was not to Burr’s liking. “Because of this,” Burr wrote in his ad, “I bought the following space to ensure N&O readers have the opportunity to read my letter in full.”
Burr had written the letter in response to a June 11 editorial that criticized the senator’s bill to create a uniform food safety labeling law, which would take precedence over state-by-state standards. The editorial called it an “ill-conceived” bill that would “scrap state food safety rules for federal oversight.”
Burr took umbrage at that and, in his letter, said “many of the points you raised in the editorial are incorrect.” He cited two — the editorial’s discussion of state seafood regulation and a statement that “the Food and Drug Administration properly regulates products that flow across borders — beef cattle and poultry, for instance.”
I went back and compared the original and edited versions of the letter. (You can do so too, at www.newsobserver.com, keyword: Vaden). The edited version removed Burr’s introductory and closing sentences, which were pro forma, and a few other phrases or words that you and I would agree were not central to Burr’s argument.
The editors also removed a 72-word quotation from the editorial that Burr said contained incorrect information. But the letter as printed did retain Burr’s refutation of that passage.
And in two places, the editors removed Burr’s assertion that “the facts are not correct” in the editorial.
Allen Torrey, letters editor, said his intent was not to change the content of the letter but to reduce its length. The letter as submitted was 739 words. Torrey cut it to 543, which still exceeded the 200-word limit that is stated in a notice to readers on the letters page. A note was added — “The length limit on letters was waived to permit a fuller response.”
The paper waives the limit from time to time when a longer response is merited, but tries to hold the maximum to 550 words.
In a telephone interview, Burr told me he had three objections to the way his letter was edited: First, that it did not allow him to make his full case against the editorial, particularly by removing his language saying statements in the editorial were incorrect. Second, that the editors had not given him the courtesy of editing the letter if it was too long. And third, that “the length limit waived” notice to readers implied that his letter had been printed in full, when it had not.
“I think we at least deserved a call from the editors to tell us they were going to edit our letter,” Burr said. “Given the nature of what this was about and that we are the legislative body, they should have given us the opportunity to edit it.”
Burr said he purchased the ad after he complained to the paper and didn’t receive what he considered a satisfactory response. (Editorial Page Editor Steve Ford had written Burr that “your points were communicated fairly and accurately.”) The ad cost more than $9,000, paid with campaign funds, Burr told me. (The N&O won’t tell you, or me, what a customer paid for an ad.)
The ad succeeded in getting readers’ attention. Michael Munger, chair of the political science department at Duke, wrote in his blog last week that he thought the N&O’s treatment of Burr was “no actual skullduggery. But a little icky.” (http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/)
Munger suggested that the letter was edited for content, not length, reasons. “If you can edit letters’ content to suit your own editorial perspective, without informing either the letter writer or the readers that you have done so, then how honest is this whole process?” Munger didn’t amplify how the editing of Burr’s letter suited “editorial perspectives.” He did say that his own articles written for The N&O always had been edited fairly.
At a meeting Wednesday of the N&O’s Community Panel, our reader advisory group, there was debate over the ad. Sherri Thorstad of Cary thought The N&O should have run the letter in full: “He’s our senator. If he’s written a letter that he thinks is important, then he deserves deference.”
Opposing that view was Eileen McGrath, of Carrboro: “I think people who are in public office get lots of opportunity to put their views out. I don’t want to see The N&O get too deferential to elected officials.”
I agree with McGrath on that. Senators, while we respect the office, deserve no more deference than you or any other reader when writing to the editorial page.
Here are my other thoughts: I’m convinced, after talking to Torrey and Ford, the editorial page editor, that their intent in editing the letter was to save space, not alter content. They gave Burr more space than normal to make his points. In fact, the letter as printed was longer than the original editorial.
The “waiver” disclaimer tagged on to the letter may or may not have led people to believe that Burr’s letter was printed in full, but it’s the standard disclaimer that is used whenever a letter exceeds the length limit. All letters are subject to editing, as a daily notice on the page makes clear. No malevolent intent there, I would say.
But finally, I do think Burr has a legitimate grievance about the removal of his statement that the editorial was factually inaccurate in places. Of the two examples he cited, it’s debatable whether the first was incorrect or a matter of interpretation. But the second clearly was wrong in saying the FDA, rather than the U.S. Department of Agriculture, regulates beef cattle and poultry (I checked with the FDA).
Burr was able to make this point in his letter as published, but I wish The N&O had either kept in the letter his language saying the information was incorrect or published a correction in the editorial column. The mistake was small, but the paper should have owned up to it and not given Burr or, more importantly, readers cause to doubt our willingness to admit errors.
