Stephen Yeargin

A friend of mine pointed out today that I have not written a Letter to the Editor in quite some time. I can vaguely recall starting drafts for quite a few, but never bothering to send them. I had a fairly good success rate for having them published, but then again I would be deeply disappointed if I was clueless as to how to write one. My favorite part of being an editor in college was writing the weekly editorial and a few columns every now and then. At least, that was the most fun. The rest of the process was fulfilling in other ways.

The struggle in writing any opinion piece is that it must have a fair amount of facts to support the statements of opinion. Facts require research and a bit of a devil’s advocate approach to see where a reader may poke holes in your argument. Like any form of writing, it also requires a clear mind and a bit of momentum to meet the proper tone for the publication. A letter writer also must grapple with the notion that for every three or four letters they submit, only one may be published.

I read some letters that baffle me as to what the opinions editor was thinking when he or she dropped it on the page. Furthermore, our metropolitan newspaper introduced a commenting system for all of their stories published to their Web site. You can quickly lose faith in a belief of Free Speech after reading only a few of the anonymous pundits. If you turn in a letter that gets published, you will almost certainly draw the ire of those that disagree with you. They always get the last word.

The Letter to the Editor has also lost a bit of its luster thanks to blogs and other forums. Tonight CNN took time to read Facebook comments on the air. But why? I think the real reason was to appeal to a younger advertising demographic. If the question is about the economy, interview an economist or president of a major investment bank. Even if the ploy was less nefarious, shouldn’t the news organization turn to slightly better informed people than the history major with a chip on his shoulder?

Here is my doom and gloom prognosis for the mainstream media. We are getting less facts, more spin, and even more watered down opinion from the so-called “average American.” The news is not meant to be a barometer of how people think and feel. It is supposed to be an accurate account of what is going on in the world around us. Energy and resources once reserved for investigative pieces are instead being used to pay a staff to monitor Twitter feeds for reactions to current events. Rather than telling us what we need to know, we get a nice, neat package of what a random market sampling suggests we want to hear.

Now, if you will excuse me, I will go back to hearing about which cockroach won the presidential race. I really wish that I was making that up.