Sound off:

SEND US LETTERS AND COLUMNS, BUT IN YOUR OWN WORDS PLEASE

We welcome letters to the editor from readers on just about any topic
and written from just about any perspective. Our readers have not
disappointed, sending us 13,739 letters in 2003, of which we published
5,204. The few limits we place on submissions -- among them length,
taste, clarity, accuracy -- are designed with the reader in mind.

What we don't welcome, and won't publish if we can help it, are
letters signed by but not written by the sender. These include
forwards of messages bouncing around the Internet, cut-and-paste jobs
from political Web sites and outright frauds sent by special interest
organizations over false names and addresses.

As you might imagine, we receive our share of all of these. We do our
best to weed them out before publication.

Why? Because to publish them would be dishonest -- the people and
groups who send these letters are trying to get us to participate in a
lie to the reader.

Think about it this way: Would you allow your children to cut and
paste someone else's words from the Internet and submit them to their
teachers as their own work?

We have a word for that: Plagiarism.

So when a reader cuts and pastes words from georgewbush.com or
deanforamerica.com and submits them as a letter to the editor, he or
she is committing plagiarism -- no matter whether the writer agrees
with the sentiments expressed. The words are not the letter-writer's.
As a National Conference of Editorial Writers colleague of mine put it
in a recent online discussion: "I agree with the sentiments expressed
in the Declaration of Independence. Does that mean I can pass off the
words as my own?"

With the spread of the Internet and the increasing sophistication of
political campaigns and activist groups, newspapers have been
inundated with these sorts of submissions. They're usually easy to
spot -- when you get four or five identical letters from different
writers, it's clear that something ain't quite right, as my Grandma
used to say.

We editorial board types have a name for these letters -- "astroturf,"
as in fake grass roots.

In just the past couple of weeks, newspapers large and small have
published astroturf letters on mad cow disease from a Maryland animal
rights group signed with the names of people in their circulation
areas. Identical letters were published by The Cincinnati Enquirer,
The Columbus (Ohio) Ledger Enquirer, Edmonton Journal, St. Cloud
Times, Washington Post, Bergen (N.J.) Record, Houston Chronicle, Miami
Herald, Greensboro News & Record, Riverside (Calif.) Press Enterprise,
San Francisco Chronicle and The Sun News, Myrtle Beach, S.C.

We received the same letter at the Pioneer Press but caught it before
publication. It was signed with a fairly common man's name, with a
false local address and a toll-free telephone number. When I called
that number, the woman who answered claimed to be the secretary of a
"small nonprofit grant-writing organization" called "Animal Welfare
Rights or something like that, but we don't really have a name."
Hmmmm. I'm still waiting for a call back from one of the three people
in her office who, she assures me, can answer my questions.

Alert editors at other newspapers had already traced the phony letters
to the animal rights group and sent out an alert. Needless to say, we
won't be publishing any of their submissions.

And don't get the wrong idea.

This spamming tactic isn't limited to leftist causes.

Letters taken word for word from the georgewbush.com Web site have
been published in recent weeks by the Las Vegas Review-Journal; The
Herald of Rock Hill, S.C., which ran letters from the campaign site on
at least two different topics; the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American; the
Lancaster (Pa.) New Era; The Daily Journal of Vineland, N.J.; the San
Mateo County (Calif.) Times; The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C.;
the Observer-Dispatch of Utica, N.Y.; The Bellingham (Wash.) Herald
and the Press & Sun-Bulletin of Binghamton, N.Y.

So far, we haven't published any of the letters posted on that site.
Our letters editor, Amira Awad, regularly checks georgewbush.com and
other political Web sites for new postings and compares suspicious
submissions against known astroturf sites. When we come across one, it
is posted quickly online as a warning to other editorial page editors,
who do the same for us.

The bottom line is this: We welcome letters in support of President
Bush and Howard Dean. We welcome letters advocating animal rights and
vegetarianism, as well as those from readers who embrace their
position atop the food chain.

We welcome letters on just about any topic, as I wrote at the
outset.

All we ask is that you use your own words to express your
opinion.

Finally, one last favor: If you believe at any time that we have
unwittingly published one of these astroturf letters, please contact
me at the number below. We will get to the bottom of it and publish a
correction if we have been duped.

We owe that to our readers who expect the letters on our pages to be
the works of the people whose names are attached to them.