Fact and opinion: "Truth" can be fuzzy

The angry politician couldn't believe it.

We just published a letter to the editor where the writer launched a "personal attack" on him that he characterized as inaccurate and false. We violated our own standards of requiring letter writers to cite the source of their facts, the politician argued.

Well, not quite. We require people to have sources for the facts they present, but opinions are an entirely different things.

The attack may have been personal, and clearly, the official didn't think it was very flattering. But it wasn't false or inaccurate. That's because there are no "false" opinions.

The Supreme Court has said as much in a series of cases where the principle of "fair comment and criticism" became a defense against libel. In a case where longtime conservative commentator William F. Buckley was called a "fascist" the court found that it was not libelous, but rather protected by "fair comment and criticism."

In the same case the court found, that while "fascist" was an opinion word, accusing Buckley as a journalist of lying and committing libel was something more provable and therefore, not a defense against libel.

Essentially, law evolved suggesting it's mostly not libelous to call a politician inept, or even unintelligent, but it is libelous to say they made off with city funds unless one can prove that.

So while the letter writer had an opinion that the politician was "off-base" and questioned his qualifications to hold office, there were no incorrect facts presented, only opinions the politicians didn't like.

Then the public official suggested I have great discretion to publish or not publish letters and that I should be judging the quality of one's argument. That may be a worthwhile goal to a point, but one that can also be prone to filtering or censoring views based on assumptions I don't agree with.

I later explained to this official, that they probably really did not want me or anyone else here to start making judgments on whose opinions are "true" or "accurate" or even if they are drawn logically from a set of facts.

That would create a system where letters were filtered through the views of one person, and their view alone, of whether an opinion was derived from facts and built into a reasonable argument.

I'd rather let readers decide if an opinion has merit and draws logical conclusions from the facts of a case. People can read. From my experience, most readers can tell B.S. when they see it or smell it.