Opinion: If only there were a device people could use to publish their opinions...
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Why won’t that local birdcage liner publish your letters to the editor? Shrinking news hole? Rising costs of ink? You didn’t grab anybody’s attention with your ‘Let me get this straight’ or ‘Gimme a break’ first sentences?
Don’t believe it!
It’s The Man, busting your message! So says our newest* destination site rejectedletterstotheeditor.com. The site takes rejected letters—from obscure figures like Noam Chomsky and Cornell West, who otherwise would go totally unheard—and sends them out for all the world to read. Says RLTE editor in chief Stuart Ewen:
IN THE BEGINNING, newspapers served to expand the vital public conversations that led to the overthrow of kings. In inexpensively printed broadsides, community-based discussions about the insults of tyranny, and budding ideas of liberty, social equality and self-government moved from meeting houses, homes, coffee house tables and workshops out into the streets, feeding the vigorous public debates that are the lifeblood of democracy. Today this has changed. If newspapers were once an extension of public debates over pressing issues, the corporate consolidation of the news media has turned the dissemination of news into a one-way street. The distance between writers and readers, between editors and ordinary people only grows... In major newspapers, the one remaining territory for public voices is the letter to the editor page, a faint residue of a time when public conversations and bold proposals shaped the pages of the press. Through Rejected Letters to the Editor, we hope to tilt that balance back towards the conversations and visions of ordinary people.
More power to ya, Stu! Anything that gets people participating is a net gain.
Of course, some old-media stick-in-the-muds might quibble about some of the history here, and question whether the high volume of rejected letters is the result of that hobgoblin corporate consolidation or a response to the reality that ink and paper is no longer the most efficient means of getting a mix of voices into the public discussion. They might even point out that the problem for newspapers isn’t that they’ve changed, but that they’ve stayed exactly the same, while an explosion of new media and new publications have provided a range of opportunities for ordinary citizens to be heard by orders of magnitude more people than they could have reached with a well-placed epistle to the neighborhood Green Leaf. Hell, somebody might even claim that papers have been herniating themselves trying to become more interactive, allowing the barbarians in through the back and side gates of online discussions, debates, blogs with open comments, extended responses to the editors, and every other forum idea that comes into the brainstorming session with the word ‘interactivity’ attached to it.
But we’re not going to point any of that stuff out. The Man’s been busting our message long enough, but with this new site, the people are about to flip the script!
*At least, I think this is the newest destination site: I seem to remember some other site that published rejected letters to the editor, but I don’t remember what it was.