The Times regrets letters did not meet standards

Many Times readers have taken issue with two letters in the Dec. 11 Travel section, which criticized a Nov. 27 article about National Park sites that address issues of race and ethnicity in America’s history.

The letters employed cultural stereotypes to suggest that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified and sought to minimize the hardships they endured.

Davan Maharaj, editorin-chief and publisher of The Times, said the letters did not meet the newspaper’s standards for “civil, factbased discourse” and should not have been published. He said The Times apologizes for the distress the letters caused.

The Nov. 27 article highlighted the Tule Lake and Manzanar relocation camps in California, where thousands of Japanese Americans were detained. Tule Lake was especially notorious, the only one of the 10 war relocation camps with a stockade and jail. Japanese Americans deemed disloyal were sent there.

The article quoted park ranger Angela Sutton, who has worked at Tule Lake since the park was established in 2008, on why it’s important to remember what happened: “We take a dark spot in our own history, something other countries might want to cover up,” she said, “and we maintain it and preserve it so that future generations can learn.”

The facts surrounding the internment are well-established. In all, 120,000 Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. Most were U.S. citizens.

In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, in which the U.S. government formally apologized to the internees and established a $1.25-billion trust fund to pay reparations.

The law said the mass internment resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership” rather than from legitimate security considerations.

The two letters published in the Dec. 11 Travel section accused the National Parks article of engaging in an “anti-U.S. remake of history” and of needing balance. The letters included racial stereotypes.

They also suggested that it wasn’t so bad in the camps and that the detainees could have had it worse elsewhere.

Outraged readers found the opinions offensive and insensitive. Some of those views appear in the expanded Letters column at left; more are at www.la times.com/travelletters.

The Times’ Travel editor, Catharine Hamm, said she approved publishing the letters, thinking the writers’ views, though provocative, would be balanced by subsequent letters of response.

Hamm said that, in retrospect, that was not the right decision because the views expressed in the letters did not lend themselves to reasoned discussion.

Maharaj made the same point in discussions with staff members disturbed by the letters, and in remarks to editors last week during a Times daily news meeting.

“Letters in The Times are the opinions of the writers, and editors strive to include a range of voices. But the goal is to present readers with civil, intelligent, factbased opinions that enlarge their understanding of the world,” Maharaj said.

“These letters did not meet that standard.”