Our ban on anonymous letters is ending

Have we become a society where large numbers of people fear speaking up because of the potential consequences? Is that the America we want?

My email over the past week has been heartbreaking. The responses to my question about whether we should allow anonymity for people who write letters to the editor were overwhelmingly in favor. The chief reason is fear.

Some feared consequences from their employers, including public agencies like school districts. I heard from a teacher and a county worker who said they are under pressure not to speak out on topics, because that might reflect badly on their employers.

I heard from one guy who said he lost a promotion and a week of pay because his employer was so angry about what he wrote.

Others feared the consequences of offending neighbors, family or friends who have contrary viewpoints

More than anything, people expressed fear of violence. One person after another said they did not write letters to the editor because America has become so polarized, and senseless violence abounds. Why risk their health and the safety of their families to offer their thoughts, they asked.

We talk in our newsroom all the time of finding ways to give voice to the voiceless, to protect vulnerable and marginalized communities. Yet, we refuse to publish the thoughts of people who fear calling attention to themselves.

The time has arrived to end our policy against running letters to the editor without names.

This is hard to swallow for some. Most members of our Editorial Board fervently disagree with my decision to change the policy, as you can read in the Editorial Roundtable I requested for Saturday. Chief among them is Elizabeth Sullivan, who oversees our opinion content. The roundtable contains their clearly articulated reasons.

Even for me, this is a challenge. I come from a long line of people who never hesitated to speak loudly and firmly for what they believe in. Our democracy is fragile and precious, requiring us to publicly stand against those who threaten it. My thinking is that we all have a duty to stand up and be counted among those who wish to protect it.

The Letters to the Editor forum is not my personal sandbox, though. It is yours. And here in the newsroom, we must have empathy for those who see the world through different lenses.

I don’t think I’ve ever received such an overwhelming consensus as I did with my question about anonymous letters. I received well over 250 responses and was astounded to see that more than 86 percent said we should run letters without names when requested.

Many wrote long notes to explain why. Here are a bunch of excerpts:

There are lots of scary people out there and you just don't know who is going to take issue.

Since the Trump years of retaliation, I do not want my name out in public, so your letter hit home for me. We are cowering in our homes in fear of talking about issues of the day, such as AR15's killing our children.

I am a senior citizen in a non-secure neighborhood. I don't feel comfortable writing to a newspaper anymore because of fear of reprisal.

I'm another coward who doesn't write my opinion because I don't want my workplace or many acquaintances to know my liberal perspective.

I am a pragmatic Republican. When something on your pages triggers me, I write a long response… then delete it because it’s not worth the hate that it might trigger.

Teachers, for example, such as myself, are often held to contractual standards that make it even challenging to speak on one's own social media page. It is ridiculous. Time to do away with it.

A death threat in response to a stated opinion or stance is almost always a hollow threat and almost always delivered anonymously. But I doubt there are many out there who would be completely unaffected by one. I would be. It just seems too real of a possibility.

I have personally refrained commenting many times, not wanting to expose my family to such risk. Nail that stands up gets hammered down.

Our society has changed and this may be why the silent majority remains that way. Opinions aren't right or wrong but our freedom depends on the right to express them safely.

As a woman, I would not want to write a potentially polarizing letter that had my name and location on it. Too many trolls out there, and too many of my friends have had serious stalkers. There are many of us who silence ourselves out of fear.

I can say that fear of negative repercussions has kept me from writing about many issues. I’m not sure if my fear is justified but it is real.

I have a law practice, am on numerous boards and have many friends on both sides of the aisle. It is sad, but in today’s world having a different political view can impact your life. I tread very carefully.

It allows our expression of what we believe without being fearful that we will be attacked. The alternative is to feel that we can never express our own feelings or beliefs. That is not what this country was predicated on.

I have strong opinions about some of the issues of today and while I wouldn't write a letter about all of them, I currently write about none of them because I have a greater fear for my young family's safety. You hit the nail on the head about the people in our society who take things too far. That is my exact fear for my family. It's very sad to me that our country has come to this place where a number of us don't feel safe enough to express our opinions. But things like family safety have to come first.

I did receive a few in opposition.

I am going to disagree about letting the trolls gain yet another avenue to spew their BS without fear of being outed. An anonymous whatever is as spray painting your thoughts on a wall.

There is something admirable about having the courage of one's convictions. To see someone put their name to their opinion gives what they write stature. Without it, it's just noise.

They have the right to express their opinions, but they must realize that there can be consequences. If those possible consequences are too threatening, they need not write; they can literally voice their opinions in different ways and to different groups.

Several people said they worry that our letters section would quickly deteriorate into a caustic, hateful forum similar to our online comments sections before we shuttered them in 2020, but that will not happen. We don’t publish hateful, racist letters now. We won’t publish them anonymously, either.

Of course, 250 people comprise a small part of our community, but these are the people who took the time to respond. And the troubling part of what they wrote is that they are not participating in the conversation because of fear.

We need to get them into the conversation. We pride ourselves on having a forum with a full range of perspectives, and we are missing the perspectives of people who fear speaking out.

The policy will officially change on Sunday, June 4. We need time to change our online form for submissions and ensure that our systems for handling letters are ready.

The default will remain to use names of letter writers. We will withhold them upon request.

One key point: Letter writers will have to tell us who they are. Readers were quite clear about this. They want us to continue to verify that the writers are who they say they are. We will need your name, phone number, email address and home address, just as we do now. We will want to talk to you about whether the thoughts in your letters are your own. This is not opening the door to lobbyists and dark money groups to peddle nonsense through our forum.

If people send in handwritten letters without the identifying information, we won’t use the letters.

If you ask that your name not be used, we will say “Name withheld by request” along with your town of residence. One writer suggested we seek descriptors, such as retired software developer, OSU class of ’74, Navy veteran, Caregiver of a handicapped person or Parent of two adult children. Maybe we can add a field to the form for that.

I need to say, too, that this is an experiment. If things go awry, we will revisit it. We have limited resources to handle letters. We publish 75 to 100 letters online each week, with many going into print. That’s a lot of verification. We will continue to aim for that number, so the verification duties should not become too onerous for our team.

But if the overall numbers of letters we receive skyrockets because of this policy change, we might have to consider limits. As of now, people can have letters published once every 30 days. If the number of submissions goes up, we might have to change the cadence rules. We’ll see.

Ultimately, the goal of this policy change is to include more voices in our letters, particularly the voices of those who feel vulnerable. You told me you have something to say. We will be proud to give you the chance to say it.

I’m at [email protected].

Thanks for reading.