“Mr. Editor: In this section, is my opinion expressed?”. Handling information in cases of Letters to the Editor

Abstract

Commonly the Letters to the Editor have been recognized by the role of allowing the exchange of opinions between readers and authors (Fernandez & Garcia, 2005). While it is possible to see that this exchange occurs, what cannot be identified with certainty is whether the opinions that appear there turn out to be the ones that their authors wanted to express. Considering the above, the objective of this research focuses on comparing letters published in the newspapers Las Ultimas noticias and el Observador with the original ones sent, as a way of checking whether the change of the information also implies a change in the identity of the sender. The corpus consists of six letters, three per newspaper. The analysis will be carried out to identify the possible alteration of information made after the edition, through the analysis of the information omitted in the letters published.