The Washington Post Got 21,000 Emails After It Didn’t Endorse. I Read Them All.

On Oct. 25, 2024, I made the rashest promise of my journalism career.

William Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post, had just announced that the paper would not endorse a presidential candidate — not in the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and not in any future contest. The decision came as a shock to the staff of The Post, and it outraged readers. As the Letters and Community editor, I felt a duty to those readers, many of whom had been writing in for weeks to ask when an endorsement would be published. And so I waded into the comments section, encouraged readers to send in letters, and pledged to read every one of their submissions personally.

They accepted my invitation, and within minutes, it was clear what I’d gotten myself into. Letters pelted into the inbox, a torrent of anger, bafflement and hurt that eventually left me with more than 21,000 emails to read. I’d never seen anything like it — certainly not on the routine days when we might receive 400 emails, but not even at major news moments such as Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance or the assassination attempt on Trump.

The sensible thing might have been to publish a selection of responses — which we did — and then to declare email bankruptcy. But even as the paper and the letters team moved on with the news, covering Trump’s victory and his swift efforts to remake the country after his inauguration, I kept reading, and didn’t stop for the next six months.

Eileen McNamara, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe columnist I’d grown up admiring, and her husband, Peter May, wrote, “Neither of us can recall a more shameful act by a serious newspaper publisher.” I heard from a former Post delivery boy who worked on a “route passed from brother to brother during the ’60s” and who for the first time felt ashamed of his hometown paper. I read despairing notes from hundreds of people who venerated legendary publisher Katharine Graham and The Post’s Watergate coverage.

My first boss in journalism, former National Journal editor Charlie Green, wrote in dismay. So did my mother.

Henry Schechter, a sharp young editorial writer at The Cornell Daily Sun, wrote that he was flabbergasted that “The Washington Post just broke the one rule hammered into journalists’ heads day in and day out: do not let outside pressure degrade your integrity.” The grandson of a Kentucky newspaper publisher urged me to “resign your position and flee from the Washington Vichy-Post.” A reader who became a subscriber in 2017 in search of excellent coverage of the first Trump administration wrote simply: “The Post broke my heart.”

I hadn’t gone into journalism 18 years previously intending to break anyone’s heart. Nor had I ever envisioned myself a letters editor. As a columnist and editor at The Post, I have to confess that I’d given relatively little thought to letters other than to acknowledge that I had no objections to the publication of those about my own op-eds or pieces I’d commissioned. But in 2024, when David Shipley, who ran The Post’s Opinions section at the time, asked me to consider replacing the outgoing letters editor, I was intrigued.

So began my tenure as a professional listener — an odyssey that would change the way I saw The Post, journalism more broadly and the fractious state of American politics. As letters editor, my job was to absorb the emotions of Post readers. But it was also to grapple with their ideas, help them make the best version of their arguments and then to validate their voices by publishing them on the same page as our editorials and across from our columnists.

Perhaps that sounds like a relic of an earlier age, a function of journalism destined to follow Linotype machines and print editions of newspapers into obsolescence. Who needs a letter section in an age of X, TikTok, Substack and Discord? Yet I learned over my time in the job that, while Americans today have more opportunities than ever to speak, they have fewer opportunities than ever to be truly heard. That, I came to believe, is the source of many of our most profound problems as a country. And it’s something that journalists, members of Congress, CEOs — really, just about anyone with any authority — might be in a position to fix.

***

Letters have long played a critical role in newspaper journalism: Before the rise of professional reporters and well-capitalized papers with foreign correspondents, letters were sometimes the best source of news from abroad. In the September 3, 1736, issue of The Virginia Gazette, an April 21 letter from Venice passed along news from Constantinople that “the Capital is in the utmoft Concern at the Threatnings of the Ruffian Empire, who will hear of no Terms for an Accomodation.” Benjamin Franklin’s career as a journalist began with the Silence Dogood letters, submissions from a fictional Puritan widow he wrote when his newspaper-editor brother rejected submissions under his own name.

Today, the letters inbox at a major newspaper is a lot like a yard sale: a mix of junk, eccentricity and genius that must be navigated with patience and determination. A trickle of letters might arrive on slow weekend days, surging to hundreds an hour after major news events. I read musings about cloned woolly mammoths and warnings of the dangers moose pose to Alaska drivers; defenses of Melania Trump’s hats and condemnations of Jill Biden’s performance as first lady; dispatches from a person who believed they were locked in a legal battle with Satan and sober policy analysis of pressing policy issues.

As I came to realize in the course of my job, the feeling that no one is listening is something of an unacknowledged epidemic — and a warning sign of civic and social atrophy.

Sorting the gold from the dross was a formidable chore. Yet as I discovered more of the gold, I began to see that I had stumbled into the most rewarding position of my career.

I heard from Bangladeshi university students who hoped American attention could make the difference in protests against their government and from dozens of Boy Scouts in Texas who wrote letters to the editor to fulfill the requirements of a communications badge. I talked to Jewish readers who were pained by The Post’s coverage of the war in Gaza and Catholics who were hurt by careless jokes in the comics.

And over time, I began to recognize the regulars.

When I first edited Barbara Morris, I thought I’d so offended her with some suggested wording that I’d never hear from her again. I was lucky to be wrong: As it turned out, Barbara had been writing letters to The Post for more than 50 years and was hardly going to let one disagreement stop her. She penned hilarious dispatches, mined from a lifetime of journals, about her service in the Navy and Thanksgiving aboard a ship, as well as touching reflections on what smartphone-addicted students were missing on a glorious spring day. When my team and I convened a group of letter-writers for in-person holiday drinks, Barbara was quick to offer advice to another retiree who was concerned about driving downtown at night. When she went into hospice shortly after, she dictated letters to her best friend to send to us.

I got to know Eric Greene, a retired naval engineer from Annapolis, who helped me understand a collision that destroyed a vital bridge in Baltimore, and Skip Strobel, a retired Library of Congress technician who worked to keep Robert F. Kennedy’s legacy alive by tending a garden at dilapidated RFK stadium. Howard Pedolsky, who had business operations in Ukraine, wrote dispatches about cities under attack by Russia.

As I got to know them, they also got to know me. “I envisioned the editors as a few old men with green eyeshades, manual typewriters and sharp pencils. Wooden desks of course,” Tony McCollam of Fairfax told me recently when I asked who he thought he was writing to when he dashed off missives about the joys of birdwatching or the state of the union.

The large majority of letter-writers came at issues from liberal or center-left positions. But while statistics about conservatives’ trust in the media are dire, I found myself in regular correspondence with a group of Trump voters who were generous enough to share their worldviews with a mostly liberal audience that wasn’t always ready to hear them.

Sometimes, though, that liberal audience rose to the occasion. “At first, I found it incredible that the letters from Trump voters demonstrated, for the most part, satisfaction with the administration. Then I reread them and felt that what we need is honest dialogue so I could appreciate them and clearly state my own beliefs,” one of my favorite regular letter-writers, a retired physician named Barry H. Epstein, wrote in May in response to letters from those voters on Trump’s first 100 days. “We need to talk, and at the same time we need to reaffirm some basic tenets of what I hope are our common values. It’s okay to help the needy. It’s okay to tax the wealthy. It’s okay to invite bright students from anywhere in the world to study and do research here, and ultimately stay and contribute. If any Trump voters in the Washington area are interested, maybe we can set up a group to get to understand one another.”

***

In his desire to both hear and be heard, Epstein was hardly alone. Indeed, as I came to realize in the course of my job, the feeling that no one is listening is something of an unacknowledged epidemic — and a warning sign of civic and social atrophy.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 85 percent of Americans believe that most elected officials “don’t care what people like me think,” a 30 point increase from 2000. That may be in part because it’s simply harder for lawmakers to listen to and absorb what their constituents have to say. When the first Congress met in 1789, each representative had an average of 57,169 constituents; by 2020, that number had risen to 760,920. For Senators, the constituent count is now as high as almost 40 million.

The volume of correspondence those constituents generate has increased, too, with the rise of email, especially form letters. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, in the 1970s and 1980s a House office might have received between 10,000 and 15,000 messages per year. As of 2020, 60,000 to 70,000 emails alone were coming into each office annually, up to 90% of which were form emails organized by advocacy groups. But despite this rise in outreach, Congressional staffing numbers were flat, making it harder to assign enough people to sort genuine citizen outreach from a flood of junk mail.

Many people writing letters to The Post openly questioned whether anyone was actually reading their submissions. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

In their personal lives, Americans say they want to have real exchanges: They overwhelmingly prefer conversations with people who talk and listen equally. But they also believe that people usually talk more than they listen, and only a tiny minority seem to surround themselves with devoted listeners. And that’s if Americans are talking at all. Just 26% of Americans talk to the people they’re with during breakfast, 33% during lunch, and 41% during dinner. At all three meals, more people report watching TV than having conversations.

The social media platforms that many people turn to for self-expression don’t actually promise an attentive audience, either. Seventy percent of Americans use Facebook, 50% use Instagram and 21% use X. However many followers they attract on these platforms, the rates of actual engagement — that is, people responding to posts — are often quite low. And “engagement” means all manner of interactions: a fleeting acknowledgement of a profound loss, a torrent of abuse, a brief signal boost of an idea that’s quickly overwhelmed by a flood of other content. No wonder so many people are at least willing to experiment with chatbots powered by artificial intelligence.

And no wonder many people writing letters to The Post openly questioned whether anyone was actually reading their submissions. I always felt a little sad when a letter closed, as it often did, with comments such as “Are you listening?” or “I don’t know how my humble words would add much to the general discussion. It is what it is.”

The first lesson I learned from this doubt was that even small gestures can go a long way toward helping people feel recognized instead of ignored. One of the first changes I made as letters editor was simply to write a detailed auto-response email about our process. Explaining honestly how busy we were and what we could and couldn’t do made it seem like readers weren’t just throwing their letters into a bottomless pit. And they eagerly jumped on an invitation I included in the auto-response to offer feedback and suggestions: Readers cared about The Post’s success and were thinking hard about what might help bolster the paper’s fortunes.

It also quickly became clear that, even as trust in the media is broadly declining, it was still enormously meaningful for readers to have their letters selected — and their ideas validated — by an institution like The Post.

“I received a lot of feedback on my writing in college — all bad,” Bruce Kirby, a social worker and therapist who was one of my regular letter-writers, told me recently. “One day though, three and half years ago, I became angry at Trump, and wrote two letters to the Post and one was published. I thought it was a fluke. … When I read my email and see that one of my letters is getting published, it is like winning the lottery for me.”

That sentiment was true even for letter-writers who might have been expected to treat The Post with skepticism given their politics. I got to know one letter-writer, Alan Webber, when he sent a note despairing of ever being selected for publication.

I’d been setting his missives aside because they were so incensed, and when we spoke on the phone, I told him so. He was surprised: He had expected that to get an editor’s attention, he would need to write at a high pitch. After that conversation, he still sent me harsh critiques of Democrats, but also wrote thoughtful letters for us rooted in his experience in his family’s trucking company. It wasn’t his most sharply partisan missives that got me thinking differently about subjects such as the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandates, but Webber’s personal reflections on what they would mean for his third-generation family business.

And while the very occasional letter writer bristled at being edited, most readers welcomed the chance to refine their ideas, a process that involved very active listening on both ends of the exchange.

Because most of the people I was working with were not professional writers, that sometimes meant pulling back assertions that would be hard to support or substituting language that didn’t meet our standards or style guidelines. This could be painful for writers with strong convictions; The Post’s decision not to use the term “genocide” to describe the violence in Gaza was a particular sticking point. But even in the most difficult editing circumstances, letter writers were generally willing to accept changes if I told them I thought doing so would help them get their points across to skeptical readers. Those exchanges were a reminder that even if Americans spend too much time in echo chambers, at least some of them are still interested in building the muscles that make conversation and persuasion possible.

And even if the people talking to each other don’t reach agreement, the very act of talking and listening can be a salve. In the midst of the May controversy over Trump’s decision to admit Afrikaner South Africans to the U.S. as refugees, Donovan Greeff, who is himself Afrikaner, wrote to a number of editors at The Post in rage and despair. “You do not know South Africa. You do not care to know,” he told us. “What you care about is how our story might be pressed into service for the endless psychodrama of American discourse — your democratic fissures, your moral anxieties, your racial politics and cultural obsessions.”

I had no real expectation that he would be open to turning an eloquent indictment that ran to thousands of words into a tightly-edited letter. But I asked anyway. “I will just choose to trust you, I guess,” he wrote back. “I’m just happy someone heard my little scream into the wind.” After we published the final result, Greeff reflected that “the past couple of weeks have been pretty awful, but this has helped me channel some of that frustration into something more focused and constructuive — and, frankly, helped me find my footing again.”

***

In truth, I felt I owed Greeff more thanks than he owed me. His letter arrived shortly after I’d finished slogging through those 21,000 letters about The Post’s non-endorsement. And his open-hearted response helped remind me about the power of listening at a moment when I wondered if keeping my promise to read all that email was actually counterproductive.

There were times during the period following Oct. 25 when I wondered if what I was really doing was absorbing anger that someone else deserved and collecting insights so other people could ignore them. As one writer put it in a note addressed to Post owner Jeff Bezos, “Shame on you for making Alyssa read all of these instead of you.”

I ultimately concluded, though, that those 21,000 letters and the time I spent with them were a gift rather than a burden. I emerged from that experience with a better understanding of the widening gulf between what our readers expected from us and what our owner and leaders wanted the paper to be. That clarity contributed to my decision to leave The Post this summer.

It isn’t just citizens who need to be better listeners. It’s also leaders and institutions — perhaps especially in D.C., which, as the country’s capital, should be an earnest center of listening.

Recently, Linda Falcao, one of the regulars, told me that she found herself writing less frequently. “The decline of the ability of the citizenry to absorb, digest, and act on complex information, and consider alternatives, is one of the things that makes me extremely pessimistic about the future of our democracy,” she explained. “A participatory democracy depends on citizens having these skills.”

But it isn’t just citizens who need to be better listeners. It’s also leaders and institutions — perhaps especially in D.C., which, as the country’s capital, should be an earnest center of listening.

Some of the changes that would help are practical, even mundane. Congress, for instance, could radically increase staffing budgets, with the goal of allowing aides to read constituents’ letters and emails more quickly and respond to more of those queries personally and substantively. That work takes time and dedication, but it could reap enormous results by making voters feel a personal connection to what is happening in government. News organizations could reinvest in traditional accountability roles such as ombudsmen and reader representatives. Technology can help too: During my tenure as letters editor, we explored using artificial intelligence to surface excellent reader comments and letters for reporters and editors to respond to, rather than simply employing screening tools to filter out offensive content. And big news organizations could learn from the experiments of smaller outlets like the Midcoast Villager, a Maine newspaper that operates a cafe out of its offices, in part to facilitate spontaneous encounters with readers.

But part of the shift emanating from our leading institutions would have to be attitudinal. There have been good reasons for journalists to avoid ugly comments sections or spend less time on social media platforms like X. And maybe comments sections and X aren’t the best places for truly listening anyway. Fortunately, the experiences of independent journalists and creators who are forging direct relationships with customers and nurturing them through newsletters, live chats and in-person meetups demonstrate that there are other paths to engagement — and that the rewards, financial and otherwise, can be worth the risk.

There are, unfortunately, fewer models to encourage lawmakers to become better listeners. Trump and Vice President JD Vance appear to regard holding forth on social media — frequently in smug, point-scoring mode — as a core responsibility of their jobs. The lesson Democrats like Gavin Newsom appear to have taken from the 2024 election is that they should do exactly the same. And many members of Congress seem to prioritize pontificating on cable news over passing legislation. But if staff could devote more time to the frontline work of listening to constituents, they might be able to identify creative thinkers who would make good conversation partners for their bosses, and for each other.

Encouraging a renewed commitment to really deep listening will require leaders of all kinds to recognize that listening can be joyful and intellectually inspiring as well as a duty. I can attest to how true that is, even at the toughest moments.

Reading those thousands of letters, and seeing what happened when I responded to so many of them, left me with an optimistic view about both our citizenry and what is possible when you hear them out. It’s a sentiment E.B. White captured more than 80 years ago. In 1943, the Writers’ War Board asked The New Yorker for “a statement on ‘The Meaning of Democracy,’” and White took up the task. “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time,” he wrote. “It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor.”

Alyssa Rosenberg is co-host of the “Across the Movie Aisle” podcast and a writer and editor in Washington.