Jeff Potter has edited The Commons since 2008 and has been working in and around newspapers and other publications for more than 40 years. He's still learning.
BRATTLEBORO-When we published Mindy Haskins Rogers' piece "No more secrecy" in the Aug. 11, 2021 issue, we knew this Voices piece, a combination of memoir and dogged first-person reportage, would be controversial in the extreme and have an explosive community impact.
The piece is a tough read. It describes the behavior of Zeke Hecker, one of Haskins Rogers' teachers at Brattleboro Union High School, whose letter to one student is a matter of public record in a police investigation from 2009, and in that letter he explicitly mentions that this behavior was typical for him. In addition to laying out the case about a predatory educator, Haskins Rogers recounts her own high school interactions with Hecker, including an encounter at his home in Guilford.
Hecker's wife, Linda Hecker, categorically denies what Haskins Rogers recounted in her piece about her, and in the Aug. 14 issue, we published a piece that let her express that to our readers. To be clear, Hecker did not address her husband's behavior in her piece, which focused on the consequences of our piece on her own life and well-being.
Some of the reaction we received to the publication of Hecker's response brought up reasonable questions about how thoroughly we checked her assertions. To list one example, Hecker cited terrifying messages left on her home answering machine. For example: Did we listen to the tape with our own ears?
I think that under the circumstances, it was fair for us to give Linda Hecker space to have her say without my trying to pick apart or influence her argument, especially as it included criticism about The Commons. Sometimes, the best role of an editor is to shut up and let someone respond.
This I know: Haskins Rogers reported with care and under legal guidance, and it took years to shepherd her piece into print. She vulnerably and eloquently addressed the issue of a public school teacher's documented behavior in the 1970s and 1980s and her own lived experience. We worked very hard to make it a valuable and fair part of the public conversation, mindful that the piece would also unavoidably be hurtful to some.
Under ordinary circumstances, we check as many discrete facts as we can reasonably do, and we've started to add a note to the tail end of Voices content on our website that does speak to both these efforts, their limits, and our ongoing efforts to develop more formal processes for a section I've lovingly edited for almost 17 years.
But in this case, "the reader might have the impression that The Commons fact checked all of [Linda Hecker's] statements before publishing them," Haskins Rogers wrote me, while understanding my reasoning for editorial restraint with Hecker.
That's fair, too.
So here I am, for the record, telling you why I didn't and offering a peek under the hood of how we think about some of these conundra.
It's helpful for readers to keep in mind that no newspaper has - or has ever had - the resources to do the rigorous fact-checking that, say, The New Yorker is famous for. I've worked for magazines that followed this protocol, which deconstructs and essentially retraces and reassembles the writer's entire process of reporting and researching. The process is hairsplitting and, in the context and immediacy of a news publication, almost always counterproductive.
Even as we do our most meticulous editing, we often find ourselves still having to borrow the disclaimer from The Moth's storytelling podcasts and radio show. Some of the material you read in this section is "true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers."
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When we publish material that's important to a community, it can be unavoidably hurtful to some. At the same time, we try to keep the larger public interest in mind and intend for the Voices section to give people voice and to expose our readers to material that they might not otherwise seek out.
In that spirit, we have been taking baby steps back into the deeply divisive and heartbreaking Israel/Palestine issue, and some of our Jewish readers have been extremely upset because of two letters in last week's paper.
Several weeks ago, we published a response to a previous letter from Mark Treinkman, who has deep personal connections to Israel and finds the rhetoric of protests and protestors terrifying in a very real era of rising antisemitism nationwide.
Kate Casa, who is as far removed from Trienkman's position as you can get, has deep personal and professional connections to the region. Her background includes reporting from the Middle East and, much more recently, she has engaged with the issue in her work for colleges and nonprofits. She brings her own expertise and lived experience that I can't dismiss, along with her own academic and historical sources.
To some readers, my publishing Trienkman's piece makes me "complicit in genocide." To other readers, publishing Casa's response is blood libel and puts Jewish Vermonters in harm's way.
We still struggle with good people on each side of this topic adamantly convinced, in their hearts, that those on the other side are ill-informed spreaders of hurtful propaganda - perhaps unwitting, perhaps maliciously.
Call me naïve, but I actually believe in a universe where wildly different perspectives can still be logically consistent, and I'm troubled by this dynamic. But it's easy for me to say: I'm not the one who's getting rocks thrown through windows.
Yes, a few days ago, this happened to a Windham County Jewish family. Let that sink in for a minute.
Several months ago, I also learned of chilling threats made against a young woman of Palestinian descent, with her mom unwittingly echoing the same terror that I hear from the other side of the divide.
For now, I'm left with a perception that all the fact checking in the world will never advance an issue in the eyes of people who won't even consider any fact that challenges a core belief and who are convinced - maybe rightly, maybe wrongly - that the other side is amplifying dangerous lies.
I will say that we have become much more cautious than we were this winter about entertaining discussion about the issue, and I will apply even more restraint until I can take more time to read widely from the sources readers have shared. I continue to want to lean on people following this issue from all perspectives to find ways for this community not to be torn apart, but reader safety is paramount.
I don't know where we go from here, but I'm not going to stop trying.
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So, in the end, how should readers address and trust the information in this section when we approach editing in different ways for different pieces for different reasons? Or when, no matter what we do or how we edit, it causes distress in another part of a community we love and care about?
The fact is, readers shouldn't blindly trust whatever they read. I'd really like to think that most of ours don't.
We proudly try to maintain a publication that engages readers to bring a critical eye to any media - print or web, words, images, audio, or video, from our newsroom or others. We celebrate readers who consider the sources, consider where they're writing from and for whom they're writing. That's especially true for commentary, which by definition is written from a position of advocacy. It's why in this section, we literally embed bylines into biography.
At a certain point, we have to leave it to you and trust your intelligence. In the end, we hope the larger concepts will prevail. We hope this section lets you see the world just a little bit differently when you look at it through the eyes of someone else - perhaps someone with whom you have deep divisions, perhaps someone you will never agree with.
From week to week, your responses, rebuttals, and new perspectives can unfold over time and help us all weigh some very difficult issues affecting all of us, from our corner of Vermont to the world at large. In the end, offering you a wide range of views can solidify your resolve, or it can open your minds and your hearts to other perspectives.
May we see the possibility and promise of that outcome in the form of a stronger community.
This Voices column by Jeff Potter was written for The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at [email protected].