Dumbed down letters

I've written a number of pieces touching on the dumbing down of the local The Post-Star. One of the unfortunate byproducts of a dumbed down newspaper is that it attracts dumbed down readers. Sometimes those dumbed down readers spout off. A pair of recent letters to the editor demonstrate this nicely.

In Monday's edition, a reader from Argyle blasted the paper for its alleged bias against John Sweeney, the local Congressman. According to this reader, an opinion column by Will Doolittle demonstrated The Post-Star's 'personal agenda [sic] against Congressman Sweeney.' How a collective institution can have a 'personal agenda' is beyond me.

(Of course, the paper itself once ran an editorial that began, 'In the neighborhood we grew up in...' so maybe it can't criticize readers for grammar lapses.)

But to the reader clearly has a poor understanding of how a newspaper works. Will Doolittle's columns represent the opinions of Will Doolittle alone. The 'personal agenda' of the paper is reflected not in the opinions of any individual columnists but in those expressed in its editorials. This is how any mainstream newspaper works, not just The Post-Star.

Saying The Post-Star is anti-Sweeney because of Will Doolittle is like saying The New York Times is conservative because of William Safire.

For several years, the right has presented any dissent as unpatriotic. When I've said this before, I've been accused of exaggeration, of martyrdom, of creating a convenient straw man. The right has been very clever in hiding this insidiousness, usually cloaking it in the guise of cutesy but vacuous phrases like 'support our troops' or 'freedom is not free.' But every once in a while, the cloak slips and they reveal their intentions.

Take this letter in Sunday's paper from someone in Hudson Falls.

'Enough of the Bush-bashing. The man took the fight to the terrorist, on their soil. We are winning that war... Support him or move to another country."

In the middle of his letter, he raised a number of other factually questionable assertions, in addition to the outright false ones mentioned above.

But give him credit. He didn't hide his hostility to American values behind the any smokescreen. He was up front about it. If you don't support The Leader, you should go somewhere else. I wonder if one of his ancestors was a spokesman for King George III.

I'd like to think people like this nitwit were a tiny lunatic fringe but clearly there are far more people in this country who agree with him than most of us would like to believe. Then again, with President Bush's still collapsing poll ratings, if non-Bush apologists left the country, maybe the lunatic fringe would be the only people left.

And just remember: each of those letter writers has the same vote as you.