By Elyse Montiel Santa Monica
Understanding the need — and your responsibility — to feature diverse and divergent points of view in your paper, it is nonetheless curious to me that you regularly print hate mail directed at the least fortunate members of our local community. How does this generate variety of opinion when the targets are always the same?
Monday’s letter, (SMDP, Oct. 3, page 4) for example, starts off with a mean-spirited — and inaccurate — screed against the usual targets: people who are homeless and those here without enough documentation to satisfy the writer — or perhaps just speak a language he doesn’t understand. In the letter he equates these people with animals.
How does the writer know that the “s--t on your sidewalks” was left there by someone who is “illegal?” Does he check its papers? How does the writer figure building housing contributes to homelessness? And the reference there to “lowering property values” is patently ridiculous — all he has to do is read your Wednesday real estate listings to know that.
The letters end off with the denigration of those who don’t speak English as their first language as “non-contributing outsiders.” (Thanks, at least, for the middle one, taking a somewhat more compassionate view of our community’s efforts to help those less fortunate.) You do a great job of covering local news and providing analysis of events that other media generally don’t get to. Please don’t confuse the ignorant rantings of angry know-nothings with genuine and constructive difference in points of view that can help inform us all. It really lessens the credibility of your good paper.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 6, 2005. Read the original PDF.