Political commentary by local people voicing their opinions on national politics has included more and more inappropriate school-yard name-calling in the last few months.

We’ve been working over the last few weeks, and will continue working on this moving forward, to bring it to an end.

There’s no reason anybody trying to make a political point has to do it while calling those whom they disagree with a slew of nasty names. And to that end, we’re tightening up our letter to the editor policy here are the Monroe Times to end this negative practice.

It used to be that anonymous remarks in the “comments” section of internet pages were the place for this behavior. There has been a turn in the last four years to ratchet these kinds of comments that have coincided with the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency and response to social media comments by his opponents.

One would think we wouldn’t have to censor free speech. People are entitled to say whatever they want, right? Well, not really. There is a standard by which public comments are measured in order for them to be considered both ethical and legal. Comments cannot be in lack or disregard of truth or falsity. They cannot be prurient in nature. For the purposes of a letter to the editor, a writer shouldn’t think that a string of nasty names equals a well-rounded article of miscellaneous reading that’s fit for a newspaper.

This name calling started crawling into the letters when someone called the President something negative before making any argument. It was followed by somebody supporting the president calling those against him more names — again, before making any argument. And it’s gone on and on to the point where we’re having to reject letters to the editor or edit them heavily.

And, of course, every writer assumes we’re doing this because we believe in the position to which they are opposed. It gets tiresome to be lambasted for being a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and a dyed-in-the wool conservative both in the same day.

In an effort to stop the mud-slinging, we’re going to be looking into all of the content that we run that regards partisan politics. If we see it as simply putting gasoline on our burning national fire, there’s no need to continue it. We’ve gone to great pains to be as local of a newspaper as possible. If people want to get their fill of partisan federal politics, they don’t need to find it here.

We still believe people can comment about federal, state and local issues. We don’t want to stop that dialogue. We do want to end the general nastiness that has become common regarding how people treat one another.

It’s likely readers will not see a change from what we’re printing, however, letter writers are already being called and asked to edit their comments to make them acceptable. We want to see more care taken by those talking about their neighbors in our local communities.

We didn’t start this mess, but as a publication we can hold people to a higher standard in order to stop it. If you disagree with something, fine, but in describing your argument, you’re going to need to be articulate and thoughtful. 

That’s the way it should be.

— Matt Johnson is publisher of the Monroe Times. His column is published Wednesdays.