A defended sentence and an uncomfortable, honest reread of the paper’s own accumulated coverage over time
A defended sentence and an uncomfortable, honest reread of the paper’s own accumulated coverage over time
A Reader Wrote To Cancel Her Subscription Over One Sentence and I Have Decided Not To Change It
I received, this week, one of the more genuinely upsetting letters this desk has taken in some time, from a long-standing reader, subscriber for well over a decade by her own account, informing me she was cancelling her subscription over a single sentence in last week’s column concerning a local by-election result, a sentence she felt characterised her own preferred candidate unfairly. I want to write about this honestly, including the parts that reflect less well on my own certainty than I might prefer, because I think the easy version of this column, the defiant editor standing firm against a disgruntled reader, misses most of what actually made the week difficult.
What the Sentence Actually Said
The sentence in question described the losing candidate’s campaign as having “leaned heavily on grievance rather than a costed alternative,” a characterisation I stand by as a fair, if blunt, reading of the campaign literature that candidate actually circulated, which I reread twice before printing anything and reread again after receiving the complaint, specifically checking whether I had been unfair. I did not find, on that second reading, anything in the sentence I would materially change. The campaign literature genuinely did lean heavily on grievance. It genuinely did lack costed detail on the alternative it proposed. I do not think stating both of those observable facts plainly constitutes unfairness, even though I understand entirely why a committed supporter of that candidate would experience it as an attack rather than an observation.
The Part I Actually Sat With Uncomfortably
Where I did genuinely pause, and where I think this diary owes readers more honesty than a simple defence of the original sentence, was in reading the rest of her letter, which went considerably beyond the single sentence to describe feeling that this paper has, across several recent columns, developed a consistent lean against candidates from her particular political tradition, a pattern she traced across four or five pieces over recent months that, taken individually, I would defend each on its own specific merits, but which, laid end to end the way she laid them, did give me a moment of genuine self-doubt about whether an accumulated pattern I had not consciously noticed might exist regardless of any single piece being individually defensible.
What I Actually Did About That
I went back, properly, and reread the pieces she cited, trying as honestly as I know how to read them as a sympathetic reader of that tradition rather than as their author. I want to report, with as much honesty as this diary format allows, that I did not conclude she was correct about a systematic lean, but I also did not conclude she was straightforwardly wrong to have formed that impression, because several of the pieces, while individually accurate in their specific claims, did share a certain register, a certain choice of which details to foreground, that a reader already primed to expect unfairness could reasonably read as accumulating into something more than coincidence.
Where I’ve Landed, For Now
I am not changing the sentence that prompted her letter, because I believe it to be accurate and fair as a description of a specific campaign’s specific literature. I am, however, going to be more deliberately attentive, going forward, to the cumulative register of coverage across candidates and parties over time, not because I believe any single piece to have been wrong, but because twenty-six years in this chair has taught me that editors are considerably worse at noticing their own accumulated patterns than they generally believe themselves to be, and a reader who has followed this paper for a decade, closely enough to trace a pattern across five separate pieces, has earned the benefit of my taking the observation seriously even where I do not fully agree with her conclusion.
What I Wrote Back To Her
I replied, at length, declining to retract the sentence but thanking her genuinely for the closer read of the accumulated coverage, and inviting her, should she reconsider the cancellation, to write a guest column of her own choosing on any local issue she felt this paper had covered unfairly, an offer I extend rarely and mean seriously when I do. I have not yet heard back. I do not know if she will take me up on it. But I would genuinely rather lose one subscriber to a sentence I believe was fair than lose the habit of actually rereading my own coverage with the kind of scrutiny her letter forced on me this week.
I have also, in the days since, started keeping a private running note of coverage by political tradition, purely for my own reference, not for publication, simply so that the next time a reader raises this kind of accumulated-pattern concern I have something more rigorous to check it against than my own memory, which twenty-six years in this chair has taught me to trust considerably less than I once did. It feels like a small, unglamorous discipline to add at this stage of a career, and I suspect it is exactly the kind of discipline this letter was, in its own way, asking of me.
Further coverage and commentary from this desk runs at my author page, alongside the wider paper at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/