By way of background, let me tell of an actual event. Back in the late ‘60s, a worldwide well-known manufacturer ran a television ad that I felt was very offensive. It tried to be funny about a horrible historical event that involved millions of deaths.
Well, I typed (remember this was the ‘60s) a letter to a chief executive of the company explaining why I thought the ad was in extremely bad taste. Well, the chief executive never responded but several weeks later there was a news article that told of the company dropping this particular ad.
It was explained that the reason it did so was because of the off-the-charts negative response to the ad. And what was that huge response? It was about 80 letters – 80 letters from a nation of hundreds of millions of people!
The thing was that so few people take the time to send a letter in such a case that yes, 80 was a huge response.
What has this to do with Letters to the Editor? It is a little of the same thing. People may moan and gripe about something that is happening but do they take the time to write down what they think of the matter and more importantly, why they think what they do. The fact that a letter is written and published immediately makes the writer’s opinion stand out because there are not all that many letters written even in our county of over 600,000 people. And even in a modestly sized publication like the Herald, hundreds of people will likely read your letter.
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