For nearly two decades, The Newtown Bee has had a policy that negative letters are not allowed in The Letter Hive the week before an election.

Our standing has been that political letters received less than one week before an election that contain allegations or negative representations of opposing candidates or parties that might ordinarily elicit a rebuttal or response in a subsequent issue will not be published. We have run reminders about this in print and online for at least a month.

Unfortunately we missed one such letter this week.

It opened started innocuously enough, praising one candidate before taking a hard swing at their opponent. In a regretful moment, one person on our end clearly did not read the letter close enough. The letter should have been rejected like many others were during the past week.

At minimum, the letter writer — who knows of our guidelines — should have been contacted and asked to rewrite their letter to remove the offensive content.

Those actions did not happen. Our safeguards failed and the letter appeared in the print edition published yesterday afternoon. It was also published online yesterday afternoon.

We were alerted to the letter in question less than 90 minutes ago. It has since been removed from our website.

We offer sincere apologies to Rob Blanchard for the appearance of the letter in question.

There is not another print edition coming before polls open on Tuesday, so Mr Blanchard does not have the time to respond to the allegations, which is exactly what we try to avoid with this guideline.

We also offer apologies to those who have been working with him on his campaign. We have heard from a few today, and understand the anger and disappointment being directed toward us.

The letter should not have been printed. We don’t argue that point. We cannot argue it.

This was not a calculated error. In these highly political and often emotional days, we did not try to sneak anything past anyone with the appearance of the letter in question.

That has never been how Bee Publishing Company approaches journalism.

This was a human error we hope to never make again.

Most sincerely,

Shannon Hicks

Managing Editor

The Newtown Bee