Letter to the Editor: I've been harassed because of writing letters to the editor

To the Editor:

This seems like a false issue, or an anachronistic one. I’ve experienced harassment in the past as a writer of letters to the editor of a newspaper, and my bringing that experience to the attention of the paper led it to stop publishing the addresses of letter writers. That was way before the days of online anything, and the only tool available to potential harassers was the old fashioned phone book. These days anyone can be tracked down one way or another online for harassment, and any local identifier could help that search – even simply being a subscriber to the Shoreline Area News. Anonymity can be necessary for self-protection.

I read these dispatches every day, and it seems to me our editor can be trusted to distinguish between legitimate commentary that might attract harassment, and destructive personal attacks that shouldn’t be allowed anyway. That’s what editors are for. Commentaries that contain misinformation should be rejected by the editor, or rebutted by other letter-writers. Also, the internet is full of anonymous or pseudonymous commentaries anyway, so what’s the difference? And what identification do letter-writers give our editor, beyond an email address on a server somewhere in Bermuda, and a name that could be false?

Chris Nielsen

Shoreline