“The Letters Page”

The situation

Dale is not a real man. He's a composite, built out of cases like his, with the names changed. Here's his life. He's fifty-eight. He edits the only newspaper in a county of nineteen thousand people, and he's done it for twenty-two years. Eleven years left on the mortgage. A daughter at the community college. A wife who works the front desk at the clinic and carries the insurance when the paper's plan changes again. He writes the obituaries himself because he knew most of them. Two weeks ago the school board voted four to three on a new curriculum policy, and the town has not stopped talking. Letters came in. Thirty-one of them. Farmers, a retired principal, two teachers, a woman who signed hers with her phone number in case anybody wanted to argue. Nine came from church people. Some on church letterhead. Two signed by pastors. Tuesday at four-eleven in the afternoon, an email from the publisher lands in Dale's inbox. It reads: Going forward, every letter touching the board vote comes to me before it goes to the page. We will not be running the ones from churches. It reads as organized advocacy, not community comment, and the Ledger can't be seen taking a side. Page closes Thursday at noon. Please confirm you understand. Dale reads it twice. He's fifty-eight years old in a town with one newspaper. If he says no, there isn't a second newspaper to go work for.

The technique

So what's actually being run here? Not a conspiracy. A method, and it has parts. The first part is the one named in the book, William Green's Rules for Radical Christians, as a conviction redefined as conduct. Nobody told Dale that Christians may not speak. The letters were reclassified. They stopped being neighbors' opinions and became organized advocacy. That's a category, and it sounds like a professional standard instead of a religious exclusion, which is exactly why it works. The same four hundred words from a man who farms are community comment. From a man who pastors, they're a campaign. The second part is manufactured consensus. A letters page isn't a page. It's a mirror the town looks into to find out what the town thinks. Pull nine voices out of thirty-one and nobody sees a gap. They see agreement. The people who were cut don't know they were cut, and the readers never learn there was anything to cut. The third part is the deadline that prevents deliberation. Thursday at noon. Not enough time to think, to ask, to call anyone. Long enough to comply. And notice the fourth part. This rule is not in the policy manual. It was spoken into an email and it can be unspoken tomorrow. There is nothing to appeal, because officially there's nothing there. That's the whole design. Raise the price of one word until silence is the reasonable choice, and then let a reasonable man make it.

The temptation

Ten o'clock that night. Kitchen table. The letters in a stack by his elbow, and the house quiet. This is where it gets decided, not in the office. And the voice that shows up isn't a devil with a pitchfork. It's a sensible friend, and every single thing it says is partly true. It says, it's one page in one week. True. It says, you can cover the vote in the news column and let the reporting speak. True, and good journalism besides. It says, if you die on this hill they'll put somebody in your chair who won't even ask the question, and the page will be worse forever. Probably true. It says, God knows your heart, Dale, and nobody's asking you to deny Christ. True again. That's the danger. A lie you can spot costs you nothing. A half-truth walks in wearing a badge. Every one of those sentences is a reason to do the thing, and not one of them is a reason it's right. Remember Pilate. He didn't argue with the Lord. He said, I find no fault in this man, and then he washed his hands and let the loudest voices set the page. He kept his post. He never said a false word about Jesus. He just declined to be the one who decided. A gatekeeper who hands the gate to somebody else has still worked the gate.

Your move

Here's the counter from the book. Do not fight on the ground you were handed. Dale's instinct is to argue about freedom of the press, and he'll lose that, because it's his employer's press. So change the ground. Make the rule say its own name, in writing, where it has to stand up. Wednesday morning, Dale writes back. Courteous. Short. He says this: I can't sort letters by whose name is on the letterhead. Please show me in writing the policy that makes a church letter advocacy and another's opinion. That's it. He isn't refusing his job. He's asking the institution to state the standard and to say which duty of his requires it. An unwritten rule dies in daylight. Either a policy exists, and now everyone can read it, or it doesn't, and everyone knows that too. Then two more moves. First, before Thursday, he tells one brother from church and one elder exactly what he's going to do. Not for advice. For pre-commitment. A man alone at a kitchen table at ten at night will talk himself into anything. A man who said it out loud to an elder on Tuesday shows up Thursday. Second, he keeps being excellent. Copy clean, deadlines met, corrections run, the school board covered better than it's ever been covered. Make them fire the best editor they'll ever have, over a question they can't write down. One more thing. There are recognized ideas in this territory, conscience protection and religious discrimination in employment among them. I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If it's your inbox, call a real one.

Scripture & close

Proverbs chapter eighteen, verse seventeen. He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. That's the letters page in one line. God built the world so that the second voice gets heard, and a man who quietly removes the second voice has not kept the peace. He has rigged the trial. Here's the takeaway. When the rule against you won't be written down, your one job is to ask for it in writing. This is the Media Mountain. Which of the seven mountains are you standing on? Take the free assessment at rules for radical christians dot com, slash start. Stand your ground. We'll see you on the wall.