To The Eagle:

Two Tuesdays ago, deadline day for The Eagle, I got a call from a friend with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The Eagle had rejected his letter for being too close to the election, he said, and pointed out that election day was still two and a half weeks away. Checked my email and saw that they had rejected mine, too, and sent a note reiterating my friend’s criticism. And lo! They relented and published our letters.

The next Tuesday was, in fact, “the week before the election” referred to in The Eagle’s letter policy, and yet they accepted a political letter anyway, in the form of an attempted rebuttal of my friend’s letter. Ironically, the rebuttal was loaded with misinformation, disinformation, and factual error, spiced up with a bit of character assassination. The Eagle’s new restrictive word limit precludes parsing of the misstatements, but the racist remark stands as reprehensible in its own right, and as violation of a different policy.

Eagle letter policy sounds like Orwell’s Animal Farm: all letter-writers are equal, but donkeys are more equal than elephants.

Howard Brawn

Puget Island