Have you ever written a letter to the editor?

No. I find it does little. I tell clients who get upset that the paper got some detail wrong in their case they are embarrassed to have noted in the paper that writing the to the paper to clarify or ask for a retraction just keeps it in the public eye longer. And really, I don't see politicians scouring the editorials to consider policy.
 
No, but I had a buddy in college who wrote a letter to the editor of the LA Times about Prop 13 or Ralph Nadar or some other local matter that was going on at the time. Our professor read the letter in his morning newspaper and my friend was in his graces forever. The professor read the letter in front of the class. I think we were studying the beat poets at the time and we both had a paper to present. He confessed to me that he didn't do any preparation and it was his last class for his BA degree. He showed up in class for his presentation, lit two candles and put them on the professor's desk, turned out the lights, put on his sun glasses, read from On The Road and asked the class to applaud at certain sections by snapping their fingers (you know, beatnik style). No analysis, no exposition, no paper. He got an A in the class. I was fucking pissed as the professor was known as an easy B but an impossible A. And I worked my ass off to get an A. But I had to laugh, my friend led a charmed life.

So moral of the story, writing letters to editors can be good if 1) you have a point to make, 2) it actually gets published, and 3) someone who can further your career reads it.
 
I wrote a letter to the Washington Blade, a gay news weekly (now defunct). It was concerned with the large number of advertisements for prostitutes, which made it hard to share the newspaper with friends and coworkers. They ran my letter (and similar letters by other people) but the magazine continued to subsist on ads for sex work until Backpage and Craigslist killed the newspaper hooker ad market.
 
“I never thought something like this would happen to me, but I was in the library toward closing time, and there was this rather mousy-looking librarian...”
A couple of buddies and I actually wrote a letter while deployed to Bosnia to Penthouse as a joke. I think the Postal system had their address flagged though because it came back a couple of days later not returned. My friend had sent it under a pseudonym so our first sergeant opened it up to see if he could gather who it belonged to....

Good times :)
 
Oh, forgot that I actually did wrote one to the Stars and Stripes under my Pseudonym Forist F. Krytan complaining of the rules that we had for the LA that were only there due to the stupidity of senior soldiers who were living alone in their tents.

Average Joes would tell each other to not dry their gloves on top of the grate of a running kerosene heater on full power overnight for example, but a SGM living alone does it, almost burns down his tent and we all now are forbidden to run a heater at all in the coldest winter conditions I ever witnessed ( I come from an Appalachian region of PA remember) after ten PM until 4:30 AM.
 
Yeah. A couple to the Boston Globe, one of which had a good impact (it was about UMass sitting on student loan disbursals for two months prior to forking over money that belonged to students in the first place - my letter made the Globe, and voila! problem solved within 48 hours, what a coinkydink).

Other grievances: Albuquerque Police Dept. shooting and killing people like it's their sport; crooked development project(s); manipulation of local elections; environmental degradation; educational funding.

I've been surprised at how much impact one can have on local issues via a little advocacy.
 
Wrote a letter to the local paper after the "escaped" elephant incident. Explained in detail why it was nothing but a cheap publicity stunt. Totally debunked it. They didn't run it.
 
I wrote a few back in the day, when newspapers were a thing. Had a few of them published. The one that stands out for me was about depression and the holidays; I seem to recall they had an article that dismissed danger of depression during the Christmas season. The Baltimore Sun printed that one for sure.
 
Back when the Body Count "Cop Killer" controversy was well underway, spearheaded by Texas law enforcement organizations, I wrote my first letter to the editor that was published in the Houston Chronicle. In it, I explained something I didn’t think needed to be explained, but apparently did: that the song described the attitudes of a character and was in no way a call to action.

I used Eric Clapton's hit version of "I Shot the Sheriff" and the Rolling Stones' "Heartbreaker", neither of which ever received such controversy, to underline the hypocrisy of focusing on this song about a criminal killing police. No one credibly believed that those artists weren't playing characters in those songs, so why had this song stirred so much ire from white America? The answer was clear enough to me, and I made it quite clear in the letter. That part of the letter was blunted by whomever edited it for publication.

The thing that pushed me over the edge and made me write it was the brazen gall of convicted Iran-Contra felon and traitor Oliver North calling for sedition charges against Ice T and Time Warner executives, and comparing the song to the Manson murders. That sanctimonious ratfuck has gotten my goat since I found out about his role in Iran-Contra, aiding and abetting literal treason on behalf of the Reagan administration, and then being held up as some kind of American hero by assbags from coast to coast.
 
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