Letters pages.(Letters)

SIR: May I, in passing to Frank Devine's timely criticism of the quality of the letters pages of our daily blatts (June 2003), express the view that Adam Cobb's article on our defence policy in the same issue was the most penetrating analysis I have read of any subject in your pages in the last few years.

Devine is most informative in casting a wider net than covers my reading, especially in his comparative statistics of readers and letters, but barely touches on an important issue when he says, "Authors, motivated by the time-honoured desire to see their names in print ..."

My main daily reader, the Sydney Morning Herald, publishes a stable of about twenty letter writers, as many as six of whom may appear on the one day. It is a rare day when not one of the stable appears. Given that the paper has a circulation of about 250,000 and that it is likely that several hundred letters are sent in each day, this is a weird concentration, to say the least, because it means that many other readers are denied the chance to express their views.

In 1998 the second-most published letter writer, Norm Christenson of Thomleigh (who also writes to the Australian and God knows where else) wrote a summary of the previous six months' letters pages. He found an average of 22 letters per day and 29 writers who were published between five ...