Letter: Nothing justifies publishing racist letter

Posted 2/21/19

While there’s an argument and First Amendment advocacy for free speech, I recall a time when newspaper editors seriously understood their role and responsibility in prudently managing a …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Register to post events


If you'd like to post an event to our calendar, you can create a free account by clicking here.

Note that free accounts do not have access to our subscriber-only content.

Day pass subscribers

Are you a day pass subscriber who needs to log in? Click here to continue.


Letter: Nothing justifies publishing racist letter

Posted

While there’s an argument and First Amendment advocacy for free speech, I recall a time when newspaper editors seriously understood their role and responsibility in prudently managing a community dialogue — ‘winnow the wheat from the chaff’; the sensibly written from malevolent; thoughtful, provoking commentary from repugnant, hate-filled asininity.

That was then.  

The Feb. 14 edition with the surreal, unmentionable suggestion following, “Here’s an idea …” screed (letter), is horrible and unfathomable from any angle. There is simply nothing that would justify including it in the Bristol Phoenix. 

It has to be an affront to the decency of many Bristol residents and needs to be widely condemned. In no way does it reflect the wider values of members in the Bristol community, and its publication cannot be excused with a simple cowardly editorial disclaimer.

The editor and publisher of the Bristol Phoenix are responsible in this instance for giving a platform to malicious racial hatred in choosing to publish a letter that should clearly have been immediately discarded into the garbage where it originated.

As a reminder, this is your posted qualifier for letters to the editor: “We will print any letter sent to us, adhering to guidelines for taste, accuracy, fairness and public interest.

At least live up to a modicum of civility and respect for the community and conscience of the people you service through monitoring and filtering the letters published in the Bristol Phoenix.
Perhaps now is an opportunity to admit that you made a mistake in judgement to include a letter with the kind of faulty reductio ad absurdum equivalency the writer is guilty of by his flippant notion. A reader with any grounding in reality (or sensible morality) should recoil—full stop — at the suggestion. Don’t bother reading from that point on.

I recall a time as a young boy living in West Germany, ’61-’63: It was still a tense period in the post-World War ll attempts at German Reunification and during the time (1961-2) when The Berlin Wall was under USSR construction. The Stars and Stripes newspaper would periodically issue stories of how East Germans and others behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ were continuing to cross the Soviet zone into West Berlin.

Many were fleeing the prospect of starvation and low economic resources in East Berlin, and the Soviets had continued to make it harder for them. In some places, there were multiple barriers and ragged stretches of barbed wire that people (usually younger) had to overcome for freedom on the other side.

Many times, their bravery was extinguished by a Soviet guard’s 7mm bullet in the back — their bloody fingers clawing to the rusty wire with ripped clothes keeping them hung up like ‘dirty’ laundry.

The ugly stories of our southern border will need to be told elsewhere. But (again) the suggestion made by a writer to you newspaper — whose hateful lines you had a choice in publishing — is pernicious and callous beyond words.

Robbin Smolca
Middletown

2024 by East Bay Media Group

Barrington · Bristol · East Providence · Little Compton · Portsmouth · Tiverton · Warren · Westport
Meet our staff
Jim McGaw

A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.