Have you ever written a letter to the editor of your local newspaper? It’s not that hard, and LTEs are a highly effective way to communicate on important issues at the grass roots level.
- They get read by people who care about their communities and help boost understanding.
- Congressional offices read them carefully as a barometer of what is going on locally.
- They can be especially powerful in smaller community newspapers.
- If used, they will often run in both print and online, giving them a double value.
Go to your local paper’s website and look for their policies on submission. Usually, you need to keep it within a rough word length and when completed, you can copy and paste it in a message directly to their LTE editor.
- Figure out the main point you want to make and then the facts you want to use. Write a free form first draft and then start whittling away to get it to the required length (fewer words, combining phrases, eliminating less important data.) You will probably want to go over it several times to complete this process. (The TOOLS: Word Count tool in Microsoft Word is a handy way to help you achieve your word limit goal.)
- Don’t try to cover too much ground. Keep it simple. Stick to the facts.
- Don’t be afraid to stick up for progressive values, even if you live in an area with highly conservative politics. You may be surprised to find out how many in your area share your views. Use reason and not rhetoric to make your point.
The paper will normally ask you to include your name and address and a call back number so they can verify it, if they decide to use it. If at first you don’t succeed, try again.
If your letter is used, the paper may require that you wait several weeks or months before they will consider another from you. No problem….encourage colleagues and friends to write as well. When editors see numerous messages about the same topic, they realize that their readership is interested.
Here’s my latest LTE to my local paper, based in part on information I located through resources here on Daily Kos. The main point?….Remind/educate readers that BOTH President Trump AND the GOP are working together to enact policies and programs that are tremendously harmful to America and particularly to the middle class.
It is not just Trump — it is Trump AND party. I chose to focus on recent House passage of the bill giving away your Internet browser history data to marketers...noting that those protections were in place under Obama, but removed by Trump and the GOP:
To the Editor:
Once again, the GOP has proven just where its loyalties lie when it comes to American consumers.
House-passed SJ Res 34 undoes consumer protections put in place by the Obama administration. The measure allows the nation’s ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, At&T, Time Warner, Cox, Century Link among others) to collect all of your Internet browsing history and sell it to advertisers, marketers and others without your express permission.
ALL 13 Republican members of the PA Congressional delegation voted for this bill, essentially giving away your right to refuse.
ALL 5 Democrats voted against it.
In just two months, the Trump administration and GOP have set out to: gut environmental protection and workplace safety, consumer and investor protections, and net neutrality; eliminate or weaken public broadcasting, the arts and humanities, the Coast Guard, and State Department; and eliminate comprehensive affordable health care coverage for millions of Americans.
The President says his every decision will be based on what is best for the middle class. Yet the GOP steadfastly supports administration policies clearly aimed at doing exactly the opposite.
This is a President and a party that clearly is not working in the best interests of America.
Now I will wait and see if they run it.
You could easily write a letter like this (use your own words) to YOUR local paper in YOUR state and make use of the voting records of YOUR state’s Congressional delegation. (This was a largely party line vote, so it is clear that the GOP sided with commercial interests on the Internet data measure and not with you and me. They essentially gave away our right to control our own data and essentially without asking.)
Click on this link to find the detailed listing of how the members of your state’s Congressional delegation voted on this measure: Scroll down to find the state by state listings. With few exceptions the contrast between GOP and Democratic voting on the bill is quite clear.
UPDATE 3/30: My letter above ran this morning in the Pittsburgh paper.