Slusher: Keeping it civil, honest in the final days of a campaign

First, if you've been thinking about writing a letter to the editor in praise of your favorite candidate in next Tuesday's primary, save yourself some time. We stop publishing election letters on the Friday before an election, so if you haven't written by now, the chances are virtually nonexistent that your letter will make it into print, unless you're responding to our editorial today on the presidential race, in which case we'll make some exceptions.

We publish more election letters online than we do in print, and our goal is to publish as many letters as we can. However, with every primary or general election, it seems many people wait until the last possible moment and we become inundated with so many letters that we can't possibly get to all of them.

We impose this deadline for practical reasons. In addition to waiting until the last minute to write, many people also wait until the last minute to accuse Candidate A of some vile act, giving the candidate or his or her supporters too little time to respond or correct the record. (You should be wary, by the way, of this tactic in the mailers you receive at home this weekend.) Ending publication of election letters a few days in advance helps avoid problems.

For this same reason, our news stories over the weekend will focus on strict political analysis or straightforward reporting. While it's not impossible that we would publish some new piece of information that questions a candidate's fitness or integrity, anything of that nature that we learned about only the weekend before an election would have to be undeniably consequential, carefully researched and open to a thorough response from the candidate involved. We are committed to refrain from eleventh-hour "hit pieces."

Returning to late letters, it may occur to you to ask, "Why do you have to edit our letters in the first place, and in the second, doesn't that amount to censorship?"

To the first question, I would simply say you should see some of the letters we get in their raw, unedited form. While we don't expect lay writers to maintain the same standards as professionals - indeed the fact that they don't is part of the charm - the letters we receive reflect widely varying adherence to rules of spelling, grammar, abbreviation, capitalization and punctuation, not to mention actual fact and good taste. Providing at least basic editing of letters minimizes the chances that writers will be embarrassed and that the material in our print and online publications meets a minimal standard of quality.

Writers sometimes decry it as "censorship" when we remove sentences or phrases we find objectionable, replace certain words or eliminate indisputable misstatements of fact. I can only reply that when we edit the material of our professional writers using the same standards, we are not censoring them but assuring responsible reporting and expression. We hardly consider it censorship to assure readers of similar attention to the writing we allow in our letters space. So, please, write responsibly, and be confident that we'll do all we can to share your ideas with the world. But if you want to support or oppose a political candidate, you'll have to wait until after the primary.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.