EDITORIAL: Our voices, our votes (10/24/04)

EDITORIAL

Our voices, our votes

Readers of this newspaper have seen that our recent issues have contained an extraordinary number of letters related to the U.S. presidential election. They've been from supporters of the Democratic candidate, Sen. John F. Kerry; the Republican incumbent, George W. Bush; and even from supporters of third-party candidates - one each from readers who say they'll vote for Ralph Nader and Michael Badnarik. Bravo to our readers for sharing their views. They've demonstrated how much Ukrainian Americans are concerned about what the next U.S. election will bring.

Frankly, it's been an interesting couple of weeks as we received and read these letters, and prepped them for publication. Most of the time we succeed in fixing the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, like Busch instead of Bush, but sometimes we miss, leaving in place a letter-writer's incorrect rendering of the last name of the Libertarian candidate (see our correction on the letters page). And there were a number of commentaries on the U.S. elections as well, including side-by-side opinions, "Why John F. Kerry?" and "Why George W. Bush?" written, respectively, by two long-time contributors to The Weekly, Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky and Dr. Myron Kuropas.

We try our best to leave the writers' ideas intact, while deleting anything libelous or patently false. We must underscore that the editorial staff's opinions have nothing to do with the selection of opinions published on this newspaper's pages. Perhaps sometimes we are a little too permissive in what we allow to be published, but we prefer to err on the side of free speech. In fact, we've rejected only one submission that had to do with the U.S. elections, and that was because it was written under a pseudonym by a person unknown to the editorial staff. (Pseudonyms can be allowed only in certain circumstances, e.g., the writer's life would be in danger if his identity were known, and only when the editor-in-chief is aware of the person's identity.) Some of our writers have been honest in revealing their affiliations with one campaign or another; some have not. Whenever we learned that a person was involved with a particular campaign we inserted that information in the interest of full disclosure. Some writers, however, apparently had a less formal affiliation with a campaign (that was not revealed by our research) and chose not to reveal that to us or our readers, thus ignoring what we consider to be the rules of fair play.

For the record, we published all the letters we could get in, within reason, as each week's deadline came. And we tried to publish the letters in the order in which they were received here at The Weekly. (We thank our readers for their patience if their particular letter did not make in into the paper immediately.)

The many letters and commentaries we published have clearly shown that Ukrainian Americans are no longer a "one issue" community. Long gone are the days when a candidate could show up at a community function and declare simply that he or she is a supporter of freedom for Ukraine, or merely submit to our newspapers a canned statement about his/her concern for developments in our ancestral homeland.

Besides serving as a forum for diverse opinions, another of this newspaper's goals before the election was to provide useful information to our readers about the U.S. presidential candidates, particularly as this election is projected to be a close one. That's precisely why The Weekly's editors drew up a list of questions on issues of concern to Ukrainian Americans (beyond the issues that concern all Americans, like jobs, the economy, Social Security, health care, social issues, etc.) and approached the three principal presidential candidates' campaigns for their responses. The results of our work appear on page 5: responses from Sen. Kerry and a submission from President Bush (nothing from the Nader camp). And, we ask our readers to "stay tuned" as next week we hope to share the answers of President Bush.

And, then, Dear Readers, we urge you to get out there and vote on November 2.

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