Letters to the Editor

Dear editor, In the December 2nd edition of the Home News there was very sweet letter from Karen Fowler lamenting the loss of her best friend Rosie Layton. In the letter she mentioned how much Rosie liked to dance to one of her favorite songs, Do You Wanna Dance, played by Better Daze, her favorite local band. We, the members of Better Daze, would like to say that we always looked forward to playing that song so we could watch Rosie’s performance. We will continue to play that song in the future with a salute to Rosie, our official  Go Go Girl and our favorite fan. We miss her too.                                         Steve, Dave, Rob and John                                         Better Daze Spring Green   Dear editor, Some 1,413 U.S. health care workers have died while helping treat Covid-19 patients as of November, according to Kaiser Health News. These people sacrificed themselves saving others. We must honor them. Many others became infected and ill but survived the virus, they deserve our thanks. We who have no training and little skill in caring for ill people may feel we can’t assist our fellow sick Americans, but we can do much. Every one of us must adhere to our public health experts’ advice and wear our masks in public, distance ourselves in groups, not gather in large groups, stay home as much as possible, wash our hands often and thoroughly, and help our public health workers trace any contacts we may have with infected people. Developing vaccines give us hope of a long term solution to the pandemic. However; we must not let down our efforts during the six months or so that it will take to vaccinate 250 million Americans and induce herd immunity. Otherwise tens of thousands of Americans will die unnecessarily. Today, during the pandemic you and every other person are essential workers in the fight to limit sickness and death. Bill Dagnon Baraboo   Dear editor, Christmas Cheer Tis the Season of Giving, time to spread Christmas Cheer.   To friends who live so close, but who we can’t be near.      As we are unable to gather together as a community,   we are still thinking about those who are not in good health,  live alone or in a nursing home, have no family in the area  or are isolated during this holiday season.      Can you please take a minute to be a Christmas elf?    Send out an extra card or two, letting them know  That they are being thought about and missed.    Thank you for helping to spread Christmas Joy!   Irene Rapp   Avoca   Julie Bartlett Spring Green   Dear editor, Even though our River Valley is small, what happens here has national implications. Wisconsin is a swing state and Sauk County is considered a bellwether locality featured in national reporting. All that makes us a potential target for a brand of partisan propaganda known as “pink slime” journalism. Pink slime journalism slides in trying to take advantage of the high level of trust we have for local news. The Guardian reports that one of the largest of the pink slime networks created a phony “local” newspaper to secretly influence a local school board referendum. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-labs-fake-news-...) Pink slime journalism gets its name from meat by-product sludge that is mixed into burger meat to bulk it out. It is well documented by the country’s most serious and respected journalism watchdogs like the Columbia Journalism Review, NiemanLab, and Poynter.  In short, partisan actors use hidden or dark money to parachute full-blown news outlets into local communities in order to smuggle in propaganda under the cover of “objectivity.” Strictly speaking, the term first applied to free websites run by a couple of large conservative networks, but the model has been deployed in other ways and to some extent, by all the partisan factions including religious organizations. Signs of this stealth messaging include outsiders pretending to be locals. In the most extreme cases, writers as far away as the Philippines are hired to localize freely available data. Most pink slime reporting is anonymous or by writers using aliases. Freelance reporters are commissioned to write articles favoring a party or candidate.    The pink slime content is offered for free, like a trojan horse, and often consists of local facts gleaned from press releases and data siphoned off from public sources. It is often business oriented and anti-government. You get lots of charts and repackaged statistics. It is cheap to automate and produce. The bias usually enters covertly through the selection and framing of the content. One of the reported effects has been to further divide communities into warring “camps” along ideological lines. They project an “us” and “them” mentality.  Paula Schiller Barbara Morford Spring Green