Authentic Advice?

(Fireside)

So is there a problem with fake advice column letters?

After I put on my wetsuit this morning and began web surfing, I spotted a wave coming in from Southern California. Fishbowl LA had a troubling headline "Salon, Slate Advice Columns Get Same Fake Letter."

I'm not sure whether the letter is fake or real – and my e-mails to two contacts within FBLA parent company MediaBistro asking "How did you conclude the letter was fake?" bore no fruit – but the letter that both sites posted was purportedly from a single divorced father whose ex-wife is raising their daughter to be a devout Evangelical Christian.

According to the letter, the daughter is being brought up so religiously, in fact, that she vocalizes her concerns for her father's soul and tells him he is going to hell. (As opposed to the countless American teens who actually and loudly wish their parents would go there.) The letter showed up twice in the same week on both Salon and Slate. It led off:

I am the father of a 13-year-old daughter whose mother has been taking her to an evangelical Christian church her whole life. Her mother's family is entirely Christian. I am not a Christian, and in fact think that organized religion is actively harmful to her development into a rational adult…

As my daughter gets older, however, she has started to become fearful that because I am not a Christian, I am going to hell…

Her mom thinks that I am denying her freedom by not taking her to church on the weekends that I have her, but I am just trying to help her see that other people believe other things and that having an open mind is a good thing.

I don't think it matters.

Does it make a difference in how you read it? (And this is coming from me, the fellow that American Journalism Review described as one who "side[s] with the rules.")

Advice letters aren't front page breaking news. They're not Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass territory. Advice letters are exchanges that speak to general concerns that the readers will empathize with – like fables or "One To Grow On"s. You want an advice letter to resonate. You also want it to not be the 300th time you've read "Maybe he's just not that into you."

Calls and e-mails to Salon and Slate weren't answered in the few hours I let this post marinate – I asked them about their letter verification process – but I've got to think that they must have something along those lines to make sure the person exists and responds to e-mails. But beyond that, must they check and double check that person's claims? ("Excuse me, Mr. Smith. Would you classify your next-door neighbor as 'open-minded?'")

There are some areas in a newspaper or on a website where the journalism demands a very short leash – foreign news, political news, breaking news – and some areas that barely even break the threshold of 'journalism,' if at all. (Do you really think the chess column depicts an exact chess game the author participated in, or just a theoretical?) As soon as I put down the front page of a newspaper, I'm content to give the Style/Life/Arts section some latitude.

Oh, and not that it's within this writer's purview, but to the man who wrote the letter:

Drop your daughter off at church, pick her up afterwards, and continue exemplifying that open mind of yours until she goes back to her mom.

(Update -- 2:23pm) : Jeanne Carstensen, Salon.com's Managing Editor, responded to my query a moment ago. Her response about Salon's policy?

As for the question of verification, we don't verify the identity of the letters Cary Tennis answers in Since You Asked.

The format of the column is a stranger talking to Cary, and Cary talking back. The reader witnesses an encounter between Cary the writer and an unknown individual. That's the beauty of it.

The letters are all "real," in the sense that Cary received them via email and did not make them up, but we don't know if what they say is verifiable truth. We realized early on that trying to "verify" the letters' authenticity would be nearly impossible: We might be able to "authenticate" that the writer actually sent them, but we don't use real names, anyway. And we'd never be able to prove they had the problem in question.

So Cary chooses letters that present a human problem that interests him personally and answers them sincerely.

Update, Part Deux -- Tuesday 3:14: The original author of the post, Kate Coe, exchanged e-mails with me today. She explained that she thought the letters seemed fake when she wrote the coincidence up.

Matthew, I wrote the post about the same letter, and frankly, I used my own smell test. Some readers at Salon had commented about the letter being fake, and then when it showed up at Slate, I think it smacked of either a prank letter or else some writer working on a story about online advice columnists or family dynamics or some such.

I just re-read the letters and it still feels fake. It's crafted in a way to be irresistable to an online advice columnist.

I wonder when Prudie and Tennis got the letter--if they both got the letter at the same time, hmmm.