As the famous line from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid†goes: “Who are those guys?†A version of that alarmed question sometimes comes up regarding letters to the editor in The Times.
A reader, John Hamilton of Shelton, Wash., writes to ask:
“What criteria does the New York Times editorial page use in identifying (or not) by profession, education, current or former employment writers of letters to the editors?â€
He adds:
I ask the question because there clearly are criteria being used. One can infer, from today's, Sunday's, paper, for example, that you identify people with legal backgrounds when the topic is legal. But doing so confers a degree of legitimacy on the views expressed (or seems so to me) that leaving the writer unidentified does not. It would be interesting to know, continuing with today's paper as an example, what John Viteritti's background is, or Dewey Klurfield's. For what it's worth, it seems to me that a better policy would be to identify each writer in some way that he or she had consented to.
I asked the letters editor, Thomas Feyer, to respond. He said that the policy doesn't amount to an exact science; there are judgments, not all of which are clear-cut. He wrote in an e-mail:
The criterion for an ID is relevance to the topic of the letter, or to show that the writer has expertise in the subject. Most times it's obvious: the writer is a doctor, lawyer, professor or somesuch. Sometimes the ID is included if we think it would be of interest: a high school student, for example. Sometimes it's included in the interest of full disclosure, when the writer has a financial or other stake in the subject.
But the general criterion is: Is the ID interesting, relevant or important for the reader to know?
The policy, Mr. Feyer added, “is simple, though in practice it's not always.â€
As to Mr. Hamilton's suggestion about identifying every letter writer according to his or her desire, the idea is interesting but probably impractical, since not only would it use precious space, but it also might be an administrative nightmare as editors tried to fact-check identifications and come to happy terms with letter writers about how to identify them.
I am answering questions from Times readers over the next two days. I wrote about the use of direct quotations earlier, and will soon get to a question about when links are included in articles, including the question of when the linked article or site includes offensive material that wouldn't appear in The Times.
