In the newspaper business, there are some lessons you just have to learn the hard way.
There’s an old maxim in this profession that even if your mother says she loves you, check it out. In other words, don’t believe anything people tell you without evidence, because you’ll be taken advantage of if you’re too trusting.
And even though I cut my journalistic teeth as a police reporter, I was probably still too naive and trusting when I took my first managing editor job at a daily newspaper in Illinois. I was a small-town boy at heart, and I just wasn’t prepared for the shenanigans and deceits the state Democratic Party machine was prepared to pull in order to win.
At that time, the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives was a political veteran named Michael Madigan. He still is the House speaker out there, which ought to give you some idea of his talent for survival.
At any rate, it happened that after I’d been in my job for about a year, one of Madigan’s political rivals gave me a copy of the speaker’s handbook for Democratic candidates running for office around the state. The more of them who would win their local House races, the more powerful the speaker and the party would be. It was in Madigan’s interest that Dems win at all costs.
And right there in Madigan’s playbook was his advice on how to use the local newspaper to get free publicity. Bury them with press releases and letters to the editor from the candidates, he said. And if the newspaper won’t print press releases or letters from the candidates, have the organization write the letter to the editor and have some local Democrat sign it. Smaller newspapers will almost always print letters from local residents, the book said, and seldom bother to check them out.
It was about then that the proverbial light bulb in my brain clicked on, as I thought back to all the letters our paper had printed recently from local residents endorsing Democratic candidates.
We’d been had, but I’d learned a lesson the hard way.
These days during election season, we have very strict policies about letters to the editor. We don’t accept letters from the candidates themselves. We figure if they want to get their election messages across, they can buy an ad.
We don’t accept letters to the editor from politicians endorsing other politicians. We don’t accept endorsement letters from the families of politicians. We require that letters be signed and include the phone number of the author. And we call to verify every letter we print.
Often we ask the author what his or her letter said, and if they can’t answer, we figure the letter was bogus and don’t print it.
If we get a dozen letters signed by different people but from the same fax number, we don’t print those either. We don’t print endorsement letters if several of them come in the same font and look like they’ve been written on the same printer. If we catch someone attempting to trick us, we bar them from having letters to the editor printed in our publications ever again.
We catch a lot of politicians and their handlers attempting to abuse our lettersto the-editor section, but sometimes something gets by, or comes close to getting by.
Recently, for example, I got an e-mail from a Republican Committee member from Monroe named Racquel Chiarella, who said she’d been pressured to write a letter to the editor critical of 14th District Democratic state Senate candidate Seema Singh, and she didn’t think it was right.
According to her, staffers from Republican challenger Bill Baroni’s campaign contacted her last month and instructed her to forward to various publications a prewritten letter to the editor attacking Singh.
Chiarella, who wasn’t willing to put her name on something like that, refused and went public with the whole issue – which is almost unheard of in this neck of the woods. Chiarella said the whole business stunk so badly she planned to give up her seat on the committee.
If it had been a positive letter, she said she might have gone along with the Baroni staff’s request, but she thought the letter she was asked to sign was “crude.”
“I wasn’t willing to put my name on that kind of letter,” she told our reporter. “It’s almost like, I hate to say it, dirty politics. I just felt that I didn’t want to be a part of his [Baroni’s] dirty work.”
Good for her.
We wrote a story about the attempted deception in Greater Media’s newspaper that covers North and South Brunswick, and (surprise!) we hadn’t heard from Baroni’s people with a response by press time. These are the same people who always seem to be available if you want to talk to them about one of their press releases, or something favorable, but they sure didn’t want to talk about this.
The sad part of this is that if Chiarella hadn’t come forward, her letter would have probably made it past our screening procedures and been printed in the paper. As long as her contact information was on the letter and she knew what it was about when we called to confirm, we likely wouldn’t have known it was a “Phony Baroni.”
I almost hate to say it, because I believe the letters-to-the-editor sections of our papers are a vital forum for community discussion, but you readers have to look at everything printed there with a critical eye and a healthy smidgen of doubt. You can’t believe everything you read, especially in an election season.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that Bill Baroni’s campaign isn’t the only one that is willing to abuse the process and take advantage of this important forum. If we can, we’ll let you know who they are.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].