April 20, 2007

Letters to the Editor

Submit a letter to the editor electronically | For our letter writing policy, click here

Graphic not a ‘Church fact’; president needs our prayers

In your Good Friday, April 6, issue of The Criterion, under Father Peter Daly’s column on page 4 is a graphic with the heading “Church Facts.”

How is the declining approval of President Bush a “Church Fact?”

How about a little block in the paper reminding people to pray for the president, who has an unbelievably difficult job and who is getting almost no support from anyone?

- Maureen Williamson, Carmel, Ind.

Graphic was inappropriate in publication, reader says

I have been a faithful reader of The Criterion for the past 15 years.

I have read every word of every article and believe that I have a pretty good idea of what to expect every week.

In the April 6 issue, I was shocked to see a picture of President Bush on page 4 in conjunction with a “Declining Approval” graphic under the heading “Church Facts.” I feel this was entirely inappropriate for this publication for several reasons.

First, I believe it to be very disrepectful to our president to refer to him by his last name only. Second, I still do not understand what this has to do with “Church Facts.”

If this were a survey related to our Church and those that attend regularly, I doubt the results would be the same.

In the future, please show a little more respect to our president and discretion in what to publish.

Joe Beam, Clarksville

(Editor’s Note: We’ve received several queries about the page 4 graphic in the April 6 issue concerning President Bush’s declining approval ratings. Though the Gallup Poll graphic is accurate in its representation of its compiled statistics, we did our readers a disservice by using a standing header titled “Church Facts” that we occasionally run with graphics on that page. That heading should not have been included with the graphic. The Opinion page is a place for opinions, and we occasionally run graphics there to show how people feel about newsworthy things. In this case though, we misrepresented what was meant to be a secular poll fact, not a Church fact. We apologize for the misrepresentation.)

Local site Links: