Foxx's claims just a fundraising gimmick
By Linda Brinson
JOURNAL EDITORIAL-PAGE EDITOR
Saturday, September 30, 2006

A reader kindly sent us a copy of a fundraising letter from Rep. Virginia Foxx that he received at his home on Sept. 20. Todd Poole, who is managing Foxx's campaign for re-election to the 5th District congressional seat, confirmed that the letter was written by Foxx and mailed out by the campaign.

The letter claims that:

1. The Journal attacks Foxx almost daily in its editorial pages.

2. The Journal will not allow her to write a letter to the editor to set the record straight.

3. The Journal will not print letters from her supporters, either.

The rest is, in essence, a standard boilerplate plea for donations. The Journal is running against her, Foxx says, so she needs more money to buy ads on radio and television. When we stopped laughing, we decided to address a few of the more misleading and erroneous of her assertions.

1. In truth, we have published few editorials that even mention Foxx. The most recent ran on Aug. 4 and criticized her remarkably rosy assessment of the situation in Iraq after her visit there, as reported by Mary Shaffrey, a Journal reporter ("Iraq war going well, Foxx says after visit," Aug. 1). Before that, the most recent editorial mention of Foxx was nearly two months earlier, on June 8.

Foxx surely knows the difference between editorials and letters to the editor, but her letter plays on the confusion that some readers have on that score. Editorials are the opinion of the newspaper as an institution, an opinion formulated by the editorial board. Letters to the editor are the opinion of those who write them.

Foxx's fundraising letter conflates the two, implying that the newspaper has been attacking her daily through our editorials.

2. Foxx is correct when she says that the Journal will not publish her letters to the editor. What she knows but doesn't say is that we don't publish letters from any candidates during a campaign. A candidate is naturally going to put her best face forward, touting what she thinks are her strengths and avoiding anything that might be a liability. That's what political advertising is for. When a candidate gets space on a news or editorial page, she doesn't get a free pass to say whatever she wants and avoid questions or inconvenient information.

Foxx also knows, but didn't say, that we will publish letters from her congressional staff, campaign staff and supporters, if they follow our rules and meet our standards of accuracy. Indeed, we've done so, as recently as May 14, when we published a letter from Todd Poole, her deputy chief of staff at the time.

3. The letters that poured in about Foxx's comments on Iraq are what really have her upset, of course. The congresswoman's upbeat comments looked pretty silly, coming as they did even as top U.S. military leaders were testifying in Congress about how bad the situation in Iraq had become. Through the month of August, we received and printed many more letters criticizing Foxx than supporting her. Foxx's critics had a field day with her Iraq quotes. She made a mistake, and she probably knows it.

We go to extensive efforts to publish as many letters as we can, whatever their position. We make no effort to achieve balance in terms of numbers in letters to the editor. We go with the letters that we have. If we received 50 letters on one side of an issue and 12 on the other, it would be misleading to our readers to publish equal numbers of each. There were simply lots more letters blasting Foxx than supporting her.

She seems to have missed them, but we did publish some letters in support of Foxx. There were also some supporting her that didn't make it into print, for a variety of reasons. Our requirements are published regularly in the newspaper and on the Web site, but some people seem unaware of them. There were also some letters critical of Foxx that did not get into the newspaper.

Publishing letters to the editor is one of the most important things that a newspaper can do for its community. We take that responsibility seriously. They are the readers' opinions, not ours. We don't make them up (we couldn't if we tried), and we don't suppress them because they happen to disagree with us. That might not make a good fundraising plea for Foxx, but it's the truth.