I gave up on the Tacoma News Tribune during Desert Storm, when they ran an editorial cartoon depicting Ft. Lewis as an Army Surplus store featuring a special on body bags. I'm surprised they survived it, actually, giving the finger to that large a portion of your market is usually fatal.
Anyway.
Evidently, if I am reading the linked-to blog post correctly, the TNT will reject a letter to the editor if the grammar and spelling are correct.
We routinely search the Web when we receive letters to the editor that we suspect may be part of an organized campaign. It fries our grits to publish a letter and later find out it's an exact copy of one being sent out by multiple people to papers all over the country. (It doesn't happen very often; we've gotten pretty good at spotting the "astroturf.")So, either they don't believe in real people using the language correctly, or they believe that those of us who believe in gun rights cannot use the language correctly. I'm not sure which.
In checking out a letter criticizing Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels for an executive order banning guns in city parks, I stumbled onto an interesting Web site, www.opencarry.org. A blog posting on its forum was aimed at gun-rights folks who want to write letters "to people who have authority."
...what inspired me to check the letter in the first place was that it was error-free. That’s usually a dead giveaway that it’s “astroturf.” Real letters from real people – and I certainly wouldn’t use the term “unwashed masses” – usually include a misspelling or misplaced punctuation of some kind. If they didn’t, who would need editors anyway?
They also don't seem to realize that they term "astroturf", as opposed to "grass-roots", was coined by the gun rights community.
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