In the interest of improving The Badger Herald as a source of quality journalism, the position of ombudsman was established last semester to act as a kind of public editor — an editor whose role is both critic of the publication and advocate for the reader.

Letters to the editor are perhaps one of the best things about an editorial or opinion page. They are a means by which readers can respond to what they see in the newspaper's pages and a measure of lively, reasoned debate on relevant issues to the community. They are one of the things that the First Amendment is meant to protect.

At no point was this made clearer than in the recent stream of letters the Herald received and printed about its publication of the controversial Danish cartoon. The Herald printed nearly every letter submitted to it — and as readers noticed, there were many. While I strongly disagree with the Herald's decision to print the cartoon for editorial reasons, I also feel compelled to congratulate it for devoting so much space to the barrage of letters from readers both for and against the initial editorial.

Unfortunately, the controversy also brought to light a glaring error in the Herald's letter to the editor policy. Even worse, this faulty policy probably served to aggravate a perception among the Board's opponents that letters unfriendly to the Herald receive less attention.

Why? Let's start by taking a look at the disclaimer the Herald prints in every issue about letters to the editor. You can find it at the bottom of the first page of every opinion section:

"Letters to the editor and guest columns are welcomed at [email protected]. Publication is based on space and takes into account relevance and quality. Submissions may be edited by the Herald accordingly. Unsigned letters will not be published."

Those second and third sentences are deceptive. A reader might take them to mean that Herald editors will correct spelling and grammatical errors present in the letters before publishing them to the page.

Yet, as printed cartoon letters make clear, this is not the case. In my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I counted 37 letters to the editor published on the subject. Within those, I counted a total of 46 uses of the [sic] term. This term is a polite way for editors to tell readers that they recognized an error — like spelling, capitalization or grammar — but didn't fix it.

In most cases, these errors were in letters unfriendly to the Herald Editorial Board's decision. This lends itself to the perception that editorial page editors will only correct those letters backing their own position, while letting others look bad.

I approached Editor in Chief Mac Verstandig on this subject. He responded, "At first, the policy was to not edit pieces by public figures. The idea was that we wanted readers to see how their alders and reps presented themselves, without having our editors make people look better than they are … I kept the policy through first semester, but moved it into [letters] as well second semester this year. The idea was two-fold: one, the Herald would merely serve as a mediator between readers and two, we wouldn't have to worry about all the readers who write in insisting that their comments not be edited at all … Basically, [letters] now fall under the same rules as quotes in news pieces — we present them as-said."

There is some considerable merit in Mac's argument here. However, nothing in the disclaimer about letters to the editor discloses this policy. As a result, several letters have been published in the Herald by readers who might have otherwise corrected their submissions.

And in regards to the perception that this change was motivated for selfish reasons, Mac states, "This was NOT a policy instituted in wake of the Muhammad cartoon — it came well before I even considered running the cartoon, let alone saw the public reaction. Also, it is a uniform policy — we used the [sic] tactic with both those who wrote in support of the paper and those who wrote in objection to the paper. I might add, this was never a factor in selecting which letters to run."

True enough. But every time the Herald changes the submission policy without warning readers, it opens itself up to just such an attack. The low volume of letters to the editor printed prior to the controversy only lends credence to the argument, since readers had few opportunities to see the policy in action.

Editor in Chief Mac Verstandig and Editorial Page Editor Ryan Masse would do well to make their letter submission policy clearer to readers. This would go a long way toward supporting the marketplace of ideas we so proudly defend.

Paul Temple ([email protected]) is the former editorial page editor of The Badger Herald. He is a 2004 graduate of the UW and lives in Madison.