The Laconia Daily Sun has the right, but is wrong in its decision to publish despicable letters and deplorable responses

To The Daily Sun,

I have recently become a frequent reader of the Laconia Daily Sun and I’m astonished to find such high levels of unmoderated ignorance, bigotry and dog-whistling populating its opinion section, most reflecting tired tropes of white supremacism and exclusion.

While there is clearly no doubt that the Daily Sun has the right to publish letters advocating Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the like — as well as whatever other perversions that may cross the imagination of some readers — there’s equally no doubt that the paper has the right to refuse such abhorrent opinions.

When journalist H.L. Mencken argued, “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier,” I’m sure he didn’t offer such commentary as guidance for publishers and editors.

No First Amendment right attaches to letters sent to editors; the government cannot censor newspapers, but newspapers can choose what is appropriate to publish and, I believe, by publishing a Holocaust-denial screed — among others — that the Daily Sun normalizes such speech and legitimizes it in the Public Square.

That’s dangerous, especially in a state with a history of not embracing the Other, a state that was the last in the nation to offer equality to Jews and Catholics (1877) and the last in the nation to approve Martin Luther King Day (1999).

New Hampshire, and the Laconia Daily Sun, should not be permitted to become a redoubt of America’s fearful, angry white men — the Granite State will never again be the land of Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver — and the argument that by publishing LTEs arguing Holocaust denial it is casting sunlight as a disinfectant upon racism, nativism, and xenophobia is disingenuous and unpersuasive.

The Daily Sun circulates within communities that are becoming increasing pluralistic and diverse and, in spite of the fact that some residents resent the changes in community demographics, trends are not about to be reversed.

I applaud Rabbi Robin Nafshi’s LTE written in response to the published Holocaust-denial screed. Personally, I resent that she should ever have been placed in a position where she felt compelled to write that letter. I resent that the Daily Sun put the Rabbi and her community — and all who support them — in the position of having to respond to the indefensible.

While I agree with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis “that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” I also believe that one of the “protection[s] against the dissemination of noxious doctrine” is the discretion afforded to editors and publishers as to what is acceptable in their community.

While Brandeis also argued that the best remedy to combat harmful speech is “more speech, not enforced silence,” I differ, because, in part, as I recently wrote [https://www.concordmonitor.com/Whose-First-Amendment-is-it-25144274] “the targets of harmful hate and false speech [often] do not have equal access to fora where they can confront and rebut their attackers with ‘more speech.’”

What is acceptable on Stormfront, QAnon, and 8chan, even on Facebook and Twitter, should not be adopted as normative for community newspapers.

The Laconia Daily Sun can’t choose the news it runs; it can choose the opinions it prints, it can choose whether or not it wants to become a bulletin board for extremists, and in particular it can choose to reject toxic opinions that are contrary to fact, history, and humanity and which serve only to elevate the voices of unregenerate racists, trolls, and troglodytes.

Robert Azzi

Exeter