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Monday, April 25
Privileged reporters?
by
Patrick Mattimore
on Mon 25 Apr 2005 10:29 AM PDT
Why editorial page editors need to know something about data bases
by
JTJ
on Mon 25 Apr 2005 01:43 AM MDT
Dan Gillmor picks up a story from California's Contra Costa Times about
a Republican operative who has been sending phony letters-to-the-editor
bashing Demos, more than 200 letters for the past 10 years.
According to the CC Times story.... ""Bogus letters have a tremendous effect on the readers," Times Editorial Page editor Dan Hatfield said. "People need to be able to know that the letters to the editor are real people, writing about real issues. They need to be able to believe what they read in the newspaper. The discovery of false letters makes the reader wonder about the veracity of the opinions on our pages.... "Hatfield said the paper has tightened its policy, but there is no way to screen writers intent on breaking the rules.... "The Times, [San Francisco] Chronicle and [Tri-Valley] Herald have similar letter to the editor verification policies. A writer must provide his or her resident city and phone number. A newspaper employee then calls the writer to verify that they sent it in. "Unfortunately, there is not a fail-safe way that I have found. No matter how elaborate the system one designs, there is always some knucklehead out there who wants to ruin it for everyone by proving that he or she can beat it." Maybe not a "fail-safe" way to stop this Astro-turfing, but stronger controls would be possible if an organization like the American Press Institute or Newspaper Association of American would create an online data base that all newspapers could have access to. The calling-to-check approach is pretty standard in the business. Each letters editor could enter the pertinent info on the writers they decide to publish into the data base. It wouldn't take much programming to do some automated data mining on phone numbers and/or cities or addresses or spelling patterns of names for flags to be raised. Sure, someone could always have a couple phone numbers and even a couple mailing addresses. But 200? As to text analysis that could be applied to the language of the letters-to-the-editors, see the IAJ link lower right to Don Foster's book, Author Unknown. |
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