Recall y'all

The reader's always right.

And yes, the readers always write. Especially when it comes to politics.

Between candidate endorsement letters and fiery epistles on the petition drive to oust the mayor and three members of the Coeur d'Alene City Council, opinions are packing Press pages aplenty these days. Interestingly, depending upon which day an observer takes a snapshot of that particular issue, the paper is clearly biased in one direction or the other. Much depends upon the viewer's personal perspective of the candidate or the issue before that edition of the newspaper is analyzed, of course. A newspaper's best hope is that readers will all conclude, after all the tallies are made, that the paper has been fair to both sides. But that rarely happens, so the next best hope is that readers will be evenly split in thinking the paper favors the other side.

With the abundance of words and passions flowing into letters and column submissions these days, we thought it might help to explain what we're publishing - and what we're not.

Candidate endorsement letters are fairly easy. We accept one letter per person endorsing one or more candidate, but we hold these to a 275-word limit. These are published strictly on a space available basis.

Recall/McEuen Field letters are more tricky. Because we're receiving so many of them, we're making as much space available as possible, including My Turn column submissions that often run inside the Local news section of the paper. Since the recall effort was formally launched earlier this month, we're accepting one letter per person on the topic. As an astute reader pointed out, we published, in the past year, seven letters to the editor from one Coeur d'Alene resident on the topics of McEuen and/or the recall (all of them opposing the proposed changes to McEuen and/or supporting the recall), so the need to put a cap on those opining effusively became clear.

We are not keeping score about which side gets more letters published, or more words. As space allows and under the guidelines of one opinion piece per person, our only objective is to let the candidacies and recall issue be fully vetted by members of the public. In that way, it's our hope that voters will have a little broader perspective so they can choose their elected representatives wisely and decide on the best course for their community's future.