News and views

Form letters, form opinions

Real letters are welcome: 10/ 17/ 2003

Monica Allen is the editorial page editor of the New bedford Standard-Times. This was her reaction to the news that form letters were being sent to local papers under the names of US soldiers in Iraq.

Real letters are welcome

I wasn't surprised to read that several small newspapers across the country, including some in Massachusetts, had run form letters that masqueraded as personal letters from American soldiers in Iraq.

While we welcome letters from soldiers, we believe we also have received some of these form letters.

However, we try to verify the author of each letter and have avoided printing form letters. It is not always easy to detect them. Public relations flacks have become super- sophisticated.

I started noticing a pattern several months ago. We would run a letter or an op-ed piece that was critical of the situation in Iraq and then I would receive a letter from a soldier.

I responded to the e-mails and asked the senders, who appeared to be local readers, to send me contact information for the soldier. Then I would hear nothing.

So I wouldn't run the letter. I was disappointed because I would have liked to run letters from soldiers, but I wanted to be sure they were genuine letters.

We did run one letter from a soldier from Peoria, Ill., who was critical of the situation in Mosul, where he was stationed. We verified the young man had written the letter. His letter ended up being picked up by the Los Angeles Times after it ran in the Peoria paper.

Sadly, this soldier let the Peoria Journal-Star editor know recently that he was concerned about his future in the military because of his letter.

Tim Predmore did not sugarcoat the situation.

"From the moment the first shot was fired in this so-called war of liberation and freedom, hypocrisy reigned," Mr. Predmore wrote of the 101st Airborne Division.

Several of the soldiers whose names were signed to the form letter proclaiming good news and major progress in Iraq recently told a reporter for Gannett News Service that they never knew the letter would be sent to their hometown newspapers. Some of the soldiers said they signed the letter because they agreed with the sentiments, but at least one said signing a letter he did not write felt like "cheating on a test."

The form letters, apparently pushed on the soldiers by some military official, have done a great disservice to the young Americans who face a more complicated situation than any public relations officer could ever capture.

Americans on the homefront are hungry for information about Iraq and this paper would welcome real letters from any of the thousands of men and women serving in there.

Please e-mail to letters@s-t.com, include a phone number or an e-mail address for us to verify you wrote the letter. Or you can include your family member's name and telephone number for us to contact to verify that the letter is in your own words. -- Monica Allen