I may have been ignoring my blog but not my writing. I spent Five hours yesterday writing a letter (email) to Chuck Frederick. It was perhaps the third time over the past four years that we had a testy but generally civil email debate. It began when I got a response from him regarding my recent post on a complaint I heard that the Editorial Board might be stacking the deck in choosing which letters to the editor they would publish. Chuck took strong exception to that. <\/p>\n
Chuck indicated that he would prefer that his email be kept just between us<\/em> and that he wasn’t keen on being discussed in my blog without my calling him up beforehand to get the facts straight. His request that he be contacted first is fair enough, however, I’m not a newspaper reporter. He also said this of my post: “…you certainly defamed the News Tribune by suggesting (outright stating that) we’re not publishing letters because we disagree with their views.” My readers can judge for themselves.<\/a> <\/p>\n I wrote Chuck back a whopping four and a half page email. As I wrote it I thought it really should be in the blog and so I took extra pains to proof read it. But then there was Chuck’s request that I not spill his email. I would remind him in a later email that as a journalist he should remember that anyone not wanting to be quoted should request that confidentiality in advance. Tomorrow I will post two of my emails to Chuck but not his to me other than a few quotes.<\/p>\n As it happened Art Johnston was also having a testy email spat with Chuck. Art and I exchanged our respective emails with each other. <\/p>\n I did offer Chuck an apology for getting some details a little off. Chuck thanked me for this. He also corrected me concerning his title. He is the “Editorial Page Editor” not the “Chief Editor” which is how I described him. He also thanked me for spelling his name right. I’m sorry to admit that that was just dumb luck on my part. In a subsequent email he also agreed to request that the paper make a small change in how they handled letters to the editor as a result of my commentary. All in all it was a case of civility in action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I may have been ignoring my blog but not my writing. I spent Five hours yesterday writing a letter (email) to Chuck Frederick. It…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14036"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14054,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14036\/revisions\/14054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}