Why we published that letter, and why we didn’t | Steve Bousquet

The day starts early, usually before the sun comes up.

It begins with a good strong cup of coffee and checking out the electronic mailbag that holds our letters to the editor (letters@sunsentinel.com).

One older reader writes in for help with her paper that didn’t arrive in her driveway.

Another wants to know who we will endorse in the upcoming city election in her town.

A third wants us to publish her letter telling Palm Beach County Democrats not to talk to me because she disliked my description of “MAGA-left” tactics by party dissidents who supported the suspension of county party chair Mindy Koch.

Basically, she wants to use the Sun Sentinel as a platform so she can criticize the Sun Sentinel.

Would we post and print a letter like that?

You bet we would (and did). It’s the right thing to do. Besides, who else is going to listen to her?

We will.

Letters to the editor are one way to cement the bond between the paper and its readers, a bond that endures despite the many setbacks that have buffeted the journalism industry over the past two decades.

We need each other.

You need us to send your opinions to a wider audience. We need you to show that we care, and we’re listening. That’s important, and it’s why daily publication of letters is such a deeply ingrained American journalistic tradition.

They’re there every morning.

Some readers read them religiously, while others may barely glance at them.

We know that.

We keep publishing them because they reflect who we are, and what’s on your minds.

If you wrote letters to your favorite TV news anchors, would they put them on their website? No.

Only newspapers run letters to the editor, every day.

It will come as no surprise that we get far more letters on one subject — Donald Trump — than anything else. The vast majority of it is not fan mail, though a few readers don’t believe that.

Trump generates the most letters, but Neal Bluestein of Boca Raton is giving Trump a run for his money — that is, whatever money Trump has left.

Bluestein is an unwavering supporter of Trump, and his way of making a point infuriates some Sun Sentinel readers who rightly view Trump, as we do, as a grave threat to democracy.

We publish Bluestein’s letters because he (and several other writers) are among the very few who write to us consistently from a pro-Trump point of view, which, like it or not, has a right to be heard.

Our letters are overwhelmingly hostile to Trump. That’s a natural reflection of our readership, which is largely in heavily Democratic Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Some of those who despise Trump resent us for giving Bluestein a platform for his “drivel,” as one reader put it.

Bluestein has a way of getting under the nerve of other readers. He struck a nerve with a recent letter that asked a rhetorical question made famous by Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter in 1980: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

We got a couple dozen letters from readers, most outraged that anyone could even compare President Joe Biden to Trump.

Letters, like news stories, must be fact-checked, and disagreements always arise over the facts. Writers like to cite Trump’s oft-quoted reference to Adolf Hitler having done “a lot of good things.”

The remark is attributed to Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, who said that Trump said it when they were in Europe in 2018.

It first appeared in the book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by journalist Michael C. Bender. Trump has denied saying it.

Bluestein considers the Hitler remark “a hoax.” We disagree.

Some letters to the editor fall short of publication, often because they are laden with F-bombs.

Letters that open with “I know you’ll never print this, but … ” usually get published, despite the painfully obvious attempt at reverse psychology.

Readers sometimes ask, is there a “secret” to getting your letter published?

The answer is no, but there are a few tricks of the trade.

Shorter and pithier is good. Letters on local or universal topics (animals, traffic, development, restaurants, sports, living, dying, grandchildren) are almost a certainty to be published, because we get fewer of those. Ideally, the letters cover a broad range of topics. All Trump all the time gets boring pretty fast.

Write to us. Send us your letters about good and bad restaurants, your members of Congress and the Florida Legislature, South Florida drivers, your pet peeves, your grandchildren, urban sprawl, the Florida you miss, Gov. Ron DeSantis, getting old, feeling young, and on and on.

But we know you’ll keep writing about Trump and Biden — and that’s good, too.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.