TODAY'S LETTERS: Online Ratings, Reagan and Islamic Relations Groups

By: E&P Staff Readers wrote in about online ratings, Reagan and Islamic relations groups.


30 Most Popular Newspaper Sites for October
We would like to add some important context to your website's story on the release of the October Nielsen Online ratings.

While the ratings have value as a national measure of website audience, they are not a sensitive enough instrument to accurately gauge the popularity of websites with a regional focus -- websites such as seattletimes.com. The ratings are a one-month snapshot that, in the case of the Seattle market, have shown significant swings from one month to the next. Moreover, the basic methodology underlying them has generated controversy.

The total picture of news website usage in the Seattle region is significantly different. Our data, as well as Scarborough surveys of usage in the 17-county Seattle region, show that seattletimes.com is by far the leading newspaper website in the region. According to Scarborough, seattletimes.com has the largest overall share of the adult audience reading newspaper sites. And our own analytics, which capture traffic for both the Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer sites, show that seattletimes.com leads in both the number of unique visitors and page views.

We are careful to weigh multiple measurements of our audience to present a balanced picture of our traffic and usage. We wish that E&P, in its reporting, would provide similar context -- or, at the least, a detailed explanation of the Nielsen methodology and margin of error -- when writing about monthly numbers.


Kathy Best
Managing Editor/Digital News and Innovation
The Seattle Times


More Shots Fired in 'NYT' Op-Ed 'War' Over Reagan and Racism
The news media's propensity to, well there are differences of opinion, so let's leave it at that, has resulted in a poorly informed public and terrible social policy decisions.

Is there any question Reagan started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the civil rights assassinations? Is there any question he talked about "states rights" in his speech? None on both counts. Now, here is where there might be some disagreement -- did (does?) talking about states rights signal racists? I think there is little question of that. Do you?


Michael Hecht
Distinguished Professor
Communication Arts and Sciences
Penn State University

Journalists' Guides to Understanding Islam and Muslims To Be Distributed
Is it really possible that an entity like CAIR could provide genuine guides to understand Islam? CAIR had thrived and had made a profitable and lucrative practice out of controversies. CAIR has no limit on how far to go to advance their agenda. Two days ago they paraded an eleven-year old girl in front of TV networks' cameras for nothing more than a fleeting moment of fame. This eleven year old girl supposedly got scared for her life because her neck and hair got exposed when an eleven year old classmate boy pulled her scarf.


The American public has every right to expect and to demand from the American Muslims to at least be extra sensitive to their feelings. Any action by any American Muslim that the American general public could view and could interpret as an intentional statement of aggression is nothing less than aggression, plain and simple. These are very perilous times for America. American public fear from Muslims and anything that is an Islamic symbol is genuine regardless to whether or not it is merited. There are only two possible scenarios why somebody would want to stir up these sentiments. It is either stupidity or intentional. In either case, when the bees come calling this stirrer of the hornets nest better not moan and groan.

So far CAIR has successfully managed to distract and waste the energy and resources of the American Muslim community on the silliest and the most trivial of issues. CAIR goal in these kind campaigns is to distract the Muslim community from focusing their energy and resources on the real cause of our miseries and that is the tyrannical, despotism and criminality of the regimes of 95% of the Muslim world.

It is very sad to see CAIR continues going after the most trivial of issues while the despots of the Muslim world give orders to their torture apparatus to video tape their crimes while they are sodomizing and gang raping political prisoners or while they make them disappear in acid baths. It is very evident from all the publicly posted comments on all the articles related to CAIR that the American public is getting sick and tired of CAIR and their tactics. Soon the day will come knocking when just a simple straw would cause the back of the camel to break.

Raid Mohammad