Why We Set Standards For Letters And Ads

Where do you draw the line?
There is no definitive right or wrong with most decisions in life. We often make judgment calls based on the situation, available information, responsibility, and common sense.
This same thinking applies when we set our policies for ad-vertising and letters to the editor. We know not everyone is pleased with our thinking We hope this column will provide insight into the reasoning behind our decisions.
This has been a particularly challenging election year, as the boundaries of what some consider acceptable have ex-panded to the extreme.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is highly respected by the stu-dents he taught and the athletes he coached. So, it was jar-ring when a video was aired online smearing him with accu-sations “of inappropriate interactions with students while a teacher and coach.”
On October 22, U.S. intelligence agents confirmed the video was produced by Russian operatives seeking to corrupt America’s presidential election. It was utterly false, yet it had drawn millions of views. Even though it has been proven false and a Russian operation, there are those who believe it. Such is the state of American politics today.
America’s intelligence agencies added that the Russians “are considering trying to instigate physical violence in the fraught period after voters cast their ballots,” The Washing-ton Post reported. They already have a new video showing someone destroying ballots cast for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump – it’s another fabrication.
In 2016, a viral conspiracy circulated on the internet claiming the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., housed high-ranking Democratic Party officials involved in an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring. As the con-spiracy grew on social media, the workers at Comet Ping Pong received hundreds of threats.
As the 2016 presidential campaigns heated up, Edgar Maddison Welch drove from North Carlina to D.C., walked into the pizzeria, and fired three shots from an AR-15-style rifle, terrifying those eating their meals. He saw himself as a hero coming to rescue the children. The problem was that the story was a Q-anon conspiracy falsehood.  Driven by the lie, he was prepared to kill. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
Earlier this month, FEMA workers trying to help those whose lives were turned upside down by Hurricane Helene had their lives threatened.
In North Carolina, William Jacob Parsons was angered by false social media claims that FEMA was holding back criti-cal supplies from his state’s hurricane victims. The lie drove him to go armed to a FEMA temporary office with the alleged intent of harming someone.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire, a French Enlightenment philosopher, wrote. Voltaire met Benjamin Franklin in 1778 while he was the U.S. minister in France. Franklin built on Voltaire’s statement saying, “Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.”
In recent years, election officials have been quitting in large numbers due to the constant threats of violence against them due to false claims of election fraud.
“The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are con-cerned that ‘election-related grievances,’ such as a belief in voter fraud, could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence in the weeks before and after the November elec-tion,” CNN reported.
How does a representative democracy, dependent on an informed electorate, survive when the flow of absurdities is overwhelming and consumed willingly?
What we can do is be as diligent and ethical as possible in publishing advertisements, letters, and stories in our news-papers.
We will print letters we don’t agree with and advertise-ments that promote candidates and causes we may not sup-port. But there we have basic standards we follow.
We do not arbitrarily create our policies. They are based on an education in journalism, decades spent as a journalist, consultation with colleagues, and ethics courses. They are informed by six years spent on the Minnesota News Council’s hearings panel listening to complaints against the media.
There are degrees of falsehood. Calling someone old and feeble is not the same as calling them a pedophile. Saying someone’s economic policies will increase the deficit is a po-litical statement, but saying their election could lead to in-creased “child slavery” in America is a lie that could lead to violence.
“It is both intellectually dishonest and dangerous to pre-tend that the outlandish and inflammatory rhetoric of many political campaigns is not fueling the unprecedented num-ber of violent threats (and violent acts) being committed in the name of one candidate or the other,” one of our col-leagues in the International Society of Newspaper Editors said.
“When a candidate lies, news media should be able to call them on it, and when political activists put outrageous lies in ads, news media should be able to tell them ‘Not in my pag-es.’”
“Newspapers that sell out their integrity (or, worse, gleeful-ly join the fray), aren’t really ‘newspapers’ any longer, but slanderous rags,” he writes.
Another wrote, “A newspaper is not an empty vessel or a robotic transmission belt, and it shouldn’t be an enterprise of ill repute, its pages for sale to whoever can pay the rate to dis-seminate falsehoods.”
Misinformation is meant to stoke fears. Fear provokes anger and hate to the point of vandalizing an opponent’s property or, in the extreme, justifying the death of opponents, gov-ernment employees, or election volunteers.
“With so much misinformation and disinfor-mation (including what’s being generated by AI) polluting our discourse these days, the question of how to refute it is fundamental to the journalism profession—and there are no easy answers,” Stephen J. Adler, director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at the New York University, writes.
“When the facts are nuanced, we need to explain that,” he adds.  “When they are clear, we too need to be crystal-clear that a particular allegation is flat-out false.”
For our part, we will not be complicit in stoking fears based on falsehoods in letters or advertisements and the conse-quences of where they could lead.