Business & Tech

U-T Prints 'Clarification' on Altered Letter to the Editor from Local Retiree

Key phrases were changed in letter from Samuel Ciccati, president emeritus of Cuyamaca College.

Samuel Ciccati of Mount Helix is a former president of Cuyamaca College who likes to write letters to the editor. But one published Aug. 3 in The San Diego Union-Tribune led to a “clarification” longer than the original note.

According to Monday’s editorial page, Ciccati sent this 53-word letter to the U-T:

It is interesting to note that with all the hue and cry about the salary of San Diego State's new president, there was not a whimper when the basketball and football coaches were given contracts at twice that amount and other coaches around the country make 10 times what a university president earns.

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But on Aug. 3, under the headline “Pay gripes one-sided,” Ciccati’s letter was published thusly:

It is interesting to note that with all the complaining about the salary of Elliot Hirshman, San Diego State University’s new president (“Momentum builds to limit salaries of CSU leaders,” August 2), there was not a whimper to be heard when the school's basketball and football coaches got 18 percent raises earlier this year.

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The corrected letter is now online.

Monday’s note on page B-5 of the Union-Tribune blamed “an editing error,” and said the Ciccati letter published Aug. 3 “changed his emphasis.”

Interviewed by phone Monday night, Ciccati laughed in recalling his reaction to the original printed letter, calling it “disgraceful.”

“They have the right to print or not print, but not to change the meaning of the letter,” said Ciccati, 75, “It’s pretty hard to imagine how they extrapolated” from his original letter to the first printed one.

Ciccati said Union-Tribune editorial writer Chris Reed called about a half-hour after receiving email from Ciccati to apologize and promise a correction on Monday.

Reed told Ciccati the letter was edited by a “young copy editor,” the retiree said.

Early Monday afternoon, Bill Osborne of the Union-Tribune replied via email to an email inquiry from Patch: “Your questions imply some unstated sinister reason for the editing. There was none. The clarification speaks for itself.”

Osborne, editor of the Editorial & Opinion sections, CC’d the note to Reed.

It is common practice for newspapers to fix spelling, grammar, punctuation and style in letters—and shorten them. And the U-T's letters policy says: “All letters are subject to editing.” But phrasing changes are not considered typical.

Gina Lubrano—who was the Union-Tribune’s readers representative, or ombudsman, for almost 15 years of her 37-year career at the paper—said: “Of course, a newspaper has the right to edit a letter to the editor or anything else it prints.”

However, said Lubrano, who retired in 2006: The paper also “has a responsibility not to change the intended meaning. In this case, the writer’s message was distorted. I think he was justified in asking for a correction and I’m glad the Union-Tribune agreed.”

Also commenting was Mike Farrell, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky and director of the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center.

Speaking as a member of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee, he wrote Tuesday that the the SPJ Code of Ethics does not separately address the realm of letters to the editor.

But he said, “It does encourage journalists to ‘Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.’ ”

“Well-meaning people do make mistakes for reasons that are not ethics-based,” Farrell wrote via email. “The fact that the newspaper corrected the mistake, and promptly it seems, is certainly a favorable ethical stance.”

Ciccati was president of Cuyamaca College from 1984 to 1993, and helped found the school’s Heritage of the Americas Museum and Water Conservation Garden. As president emeritus, he remains active in the Rancho San Diego school’s foundation.

Ciccati, who also was on the board of directors of Valle De Oro Bank for six years, said he now enjoys traveling, and has been to 60 countries—an outgrowth of his interest in different peoples and cultures after having been a Peace Corps trainer years ago.

Ciccati says he writes letters to the editor about six to eight times a year, but this was the first to be altered in this way.

“I’ve had a different kind of problem” with newspapers in the past, regarding his letters, he said. “They didn’t print them.”

Updated at 11:20 a.m. Aug. 9, 2011


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