Contrived Editorial Letter Page

I've noticed, from time to time, that a newspaper's editorial page will pick up a letters-to-the-editor viewpoint about an issue that doesn't really merit discussion and bat it around for weeks at a time. I've experienced an example of this recently in my hometown "newspaper" The Gainesville Sun, whose editor seems determined to bring its standards down to the level of a high school newspaper. A few days ago, a letter was printed decrying the local PBS radio station, 89.1/WUFT. The writer complained about listening to slave-trading dead white men's music. And what was he referring to? Classical music!

The inflammatory (and asinine) tone of this letter revealed, by its printing, an ulterior motive by The Sun's editor: whip up a torrent of responding letters to artificially create an issue that heretofore didn't exist. And for several days thereafter, just I suspected, the newspaper printed letter after letter taking sides on whether or not WUFT should play classical music. The original letter complained that by playing classical music, WUFT wasn't being "diverse" enough, when the truth is that they have long stretches of programming where they play jazz and the blues. Not to mention the incredible variety of other music that they broadcast, along with informative news shows. And the editor knew this "no-brainer", of course.

I don't mind a real issue being discussed. But putting the local PBS station under scrutiny, especially when considering the relative homogeneity of commercial broadcasting across the radio dial, is ridiculous.

Let me give another example. From time to time, a motorist will write (and get printed) an editorial letter complaining about bicyclists who disobey traffic laws. Or a bicyclist will write complaining about motorists who don't respect their presence on the road. And this goes back and forth for a while.

Or how about the tried-and-true (and tired and old) argument about evolution vs. creationism? That's always good for a few days at a time on the editorial page. As if public opinion should decide what is "science" and what isn't, based on twitter-length editorial letters!

Sometimes I think that my local newspaper's editorial page isn't much better than those exploitative television talk show hosts like Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, who create a divisive topic in advance, invite people involved in that topic as guests on the show, and then "objectively" sit back and watch them heatedly argue with each other, with the "concerned" studio audience weighing in. All of which is phony and contrived! Can't we do better than that with our journalism?