Last week we published a letter to the editor that likely was written by someone other than the person named on the letter. If there’s no Jimmy Briggs in Tracy who wrote about the Tracy High School football program and said the coaches should step down, the real writer should be publicly lambasted for his gutless dribble.
Only a bottom-feeding coward would spew forth an opinion and allow it to be printed in 20,855 papers under a phony name.
With that said — and yes, I feel better — we caretakers of the Voice pages admit we should have checked out this so-called letter-writer with more than a cursory glance at the information he listed. A coach who knew that a Jimmy Briggs had never played football for Tracy High, as he wrote that he did, tipped us off that the name might be bogus. Sure, he used a real address on Chrisman Road, but as it turns out, the man who lives there is perfectly happy with the high school football program and has never written to the editor.
Tracy used to be small enough that almost every letter was hand-delivered and signed by someone we knew. Even today, we know many of our contributors and their well-penned prose. I can spot a K.L. Vosburg letter, for instance, from 10 feet away. His satiric letters on random topics appear on my desk every week typed on a manual typewriter, with no spell-check but lots of white-out — if you can remember what that is.
Scott Hurban is another prolific writer who fills our e-mail inboxes. In fact, you can set your clock to his letters. As soon as one publishes, up pops another. Politics, religion, economics. He’ll tell you what he thinks.
Then there’s Earl Jess, Clif Schofield and Tom Benigno. We know their distinct writing styles and their messages that are as unique as they are.
Those writers — and lots of others — make the letters section what it is, the prime forum of democracy in a newspaper, where anyone gets to have his say. But some people don’t follow the rules, and their letters face either the dreaded delete key or the shredder. Anonymity finds a home on Web blogs and bathroom doors, but it doesn’t make it into credible letters sections.
Which brings us to our recent conundrum. What if people lie about their names? Well, that’s a crime, for one thing.
California Penal Code 538a: “Every person who signs any letter addressed to a newspaper with the name of a person other than himself and sends such letter to the newspaper, or causes it to be sent to such newspaper, with intent to lead the newspaper to believe that such letter was written by the person whose name is signed thereto, is guilty of a misdemeanor.”
Such a crime, we’re convinced, was committed again this week. Someone picked a name and address on 21st Street out of the phonebook, we surmise, and used it at the bottom of a scathing letter about West High School athletics, submitted for publication.
This time we reached the person who lives at the address listed before the letter ran, and when he insisted that no one in the household had written a letter — zap! No letter.
So now, armed with our newly polished policy of verification, we’re determined to track down letter-writers before they go to print, unless we’re sure they are who they say they are. I know that someone skilled at falsifying identities can trick us, but the chances of that happening diminish with added checks and balances.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Briggs, if you read this and you really did write the letter we published Dec. 9, come on down to the Tracy Press at 10th and A streets with your photo ID. Otherwise we’ll have to assume you’re a pretender with something to hide. Otherwise, we'll know we were duped.
And for the record, we apologize to Tracy High and to our readers.
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