Letter writers to the Newcastle Herald beware – they will without notice or care, edit and butcher your words when they publish your correspondence.

I’ve had four letters to the Herald published recently. Each time they have altered my words in some way, and in no case told me beforehand they were doing so. Up to now the changes they made ranged from inconsequential to mildly annoying, but this last time really got up my nose. On 6 June 2018 Brad Hill wrote:

FOOD for thought: a wind turbine will never produce as much energy in its lifetime as was used in building it. The mind boggles doesn’t it.

Now this might be true for a little wind turbine you buy from a hobbyist store to put up in your garden to power your electric gnomes, but for industrial scale electricity generation this is just mythical nonsense. (See for example a 2014 US life cycle study that shows that for a 2MW generator, the payback period is just 5 to 7 months.) Not wanting to just let this error go unchallenged, I wrote a carefully crafted, short 36 word letter to the Herald in which I wanted to make three points:

1. The claim was outlandish.
2. The claim was unsubstantiated.
3. The Herald bore some responsibility for allowing this untruth to be published.

I submitted the following letter …

Brad Hill is right. My mind definitely boggles when I see published in the newspaper outlandish and unsubstantiated claims such as a wind turbine consumes more energy in its manufacture than it generates in its lifetime.

… but in spite of my brevity, the Herald saw fit to strip out two of my main points and on 8 June 2018 print this instead …

BRAD Hill is right. My mind definitely boggles when I see outlandish claims on the letters page, such as that a wind turbine consumes more energy in its manufacture than it generates in its lifetime.

I wrote to the Herald expressing my disappointment in how they had edited my letter and significantly altered my meaning, but they haven’t even bothered to reply.  It seems patently clear that the letters’ editor has no interest in truth, only in controversy.

Apparently the incidence of people using the word ‘apparently’ has seen a dramatic rise in recent years and they reckon that with the current average increase of 30% per annum, that by the year 2038 every sentence uttered by every human being on the planet will either begin or end with the word ‘apparently’.

I don’t know if it’s happening more, or I’m just noticing it more, but it’s certainly becoming more irksome. These ‘apparently’ statements invariably …

• present some factoid which appears unusual or surprising;
• are unaccompanied by any substantiating evidence or reference to reputable authority;
• contain references to an indeterminate ‘they’ who ‘reckon’ something;
• and carry an implied disclaimer that the information might have been misheard, misunderstood, miscommunicated, and possibly not be true at all.

So in essence, these statements are saying that something might be true, or might be false, and convey no information for the hearer to judge either way. All in all, worthless.