Newspapers should stop trying to mislead in news section
9/10/2005
Dear Editor,
For an entire week now, I’ve been stupefied with amazement each morning when I open the papers, to read yet again about Salzman.
What terrible malady has overthrown the minds of our local editors? Why do they kneel so abjectly in the snows of Canossa, vying with each other over who can make the most self-abasing confession? “How gullible we were!” they wail. How foolishly trusting, betrayed by this Machiavellian manipulator and who knows how many other princes and princesses of darkness, at whose motives “we can only guess.”
Whatever those motives were, they had the peculiar consequence of unhinging your reason. Or else a different force is intimidating you into these humiliating postures. It’s clear that poor Mr. Wyatt was intimidated by somebody into bringing all this down on his friend Salzman’s head.
Get a grip, editors. Take a deep breath, Supervisor Geist. Your “I-am-not-a-puppet” speech resonated too well with Nixon’s “I am not a crook.” You don’t want people to start seeing a puppet up there every Tuesday.
And Salzman was not trying to look like an army by getting friends to sign his letters. “Army” is too destructive an image. He was slipping just a little more of his copious analysis of events – an analysis, I might add, welcomed by many readers – into the too-tiny space allowed to each ordinary individual in the newspapers. And now, on this ridiculously irrelevant pretext, that space has snapped shut, like an oyster.
Emperors and others who crawl on their knees to Canossa always want a penance to obtain absolution. So, here’s a penance, echoing to you from R. Trent Williams’ (Richard Salzman’s) last letter to be printed on your pages. Stop editorializing in your news section, especially when the intent is to mislead. You’ll feel a lot better, and you might get up the courage to open your shell again.
Ellen Taylor
Petrolia
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