Aspies For Freedom

I just have had an idea. We all know of various misrepresentations of Aspies in the media. Some of these are quite harmful and I think I've thought of an effective way for us to deal with them. Why don't we set up a seperate part of the forum for people to report in articles, books, documentaries, etc that misrepresent us, and wage letter writing campaigns arguing for how we would like to be perceived and why do we think it is inaccurate or unfair to portray us in the way they do.

It doesn't have to be part of the forum either, it can be part of the main site. I could (or someone better at writing than me) prepare letters to be sent to the offending organisation/person, and then others could either write their own letter or just add their name to the pre-prepared letter.

Please tell me what you think about this. I got the idea from a nursing advocay site called at http://www.nursingadvocacy.org ? I think, if people want to look at what I am thinking of. When I get home from uni tonight I will have a look at whats been posted, if anything.

Enigmatic_Oddity Wrote:

Why don't we set up a separate part of the forum for people to report in articles, books, documentaries, etc that misrepresent us

I thought that this "News and media" forum was intended for that very same purpose.

Enigmatic_Oddity Wrote:

I could (or someone better at writing than me) prepare letters to be sent to the offending organisation/person, and then others could either write their own letter or just add their name to the pre-prepared letter.

Much better for people to write their own letter. Pre-prepared letters smack of mass mailshots. It's worth reading what WriteToThem.com (formerly FaxYourMP.com) have to say about this practice. (It's a website set up to enable British voters to fax or email their elected representatives.)

WriteToThem.com Wrote:

Why shouldn't I copy and paste "form" letters?

    We know your issue is important to you, but we've spoken to representatives � and if you are not a constituent, or you send a "copied and pasted" form letter, your message will go straight into the bin.

    If you're a pressure group, please think about what you're doing. If you encourage all your members to write to the same representative, you will not show that representative the depth of support for your issue. We now block large form letter campaigns sent to individuals, but even if we did let through your mail, we know from experience that you'll simply have used up a few sheets of tax-funded paper, and irritated an underpaid secretary or researcher. And if you encourage your supporters to all send the same rote letter to different representatives, the recipients will just assume you have a nasty little man [sic] with a computer and a list of addresses blasting them out from your office. Then they'll ignore you, whereas if you'd asked people to write to their own representatives in their own words, you'd be ahead of the game.

    Still not convinced? Here's a quote from a Parliamentary researcher, whose job is to make the MP he/she works for as accessible as possible (such people are the hidden gems of our democracy):

        MPs rather naturally take a sudden influx of identical or similar messages with a large pinch of salt, since they know that what they are seeing is stuff from a minority of constituents who are either impassioned/neurotic about the topic concerned or who are easily gulled into agreeing with some plausible story and sending the message, since it takes minimum effort to do so.

        Given a daily mailbag of (say) 50 individual messages from individual constituents, on a wide range of topics, when the mailbag suddenly rises to 100 a day, 50 of which are much the same as each other, the representative has no way at all of knowing whether the message concerned is representative of opinion in the constituency.

        All he or she knows is that 50 constituents have been persuaded to mail them about 'topic X'. Much more notice is taken of trends within the regular flow of messages from clearly identified constituents. If in a month 50 people write in different ways and through different routes with similar views on a subject, this is much more likely to raise the profile of the topic with the MP.

    So please don't copy and paste the same message as everyone else. And don't encourage others to do so. It's worse than useless as we'll automatically stop your messages before they get through. Ask people to write in their own words. If they care enough about your issue, they'll do so.

http://www.writetothem.com/about-qa#formletters

I think it could be very productive for people to write/email media or organizations, some of us have done this in the past and had a positive response.

Greetings,

I thought it was one of the things this group was aimed at anyway.

True, but I thought it would be good if the PR campaign could be more organised, so that anybody who was interested, not just members, could be part of it. And though pre-prepared letters aren't the greatest, they can encourage people who don't have the time to send one.

By organised, I also mean that a person/group to send to is clearly identified as well so we know exactly who is responsible and who we should write to to make a difference.

Yeah, it is a sort of aim of AFF already, so I was a bit hesitant to say it. But it could be a bit of a bigger focus that it has now.

I think it would save time for those who are willing to write letters if someone could do the work of finding out who to write to and their proper mailing address and publicising this information in a timely fashion.

I think organised letter-writing campaigns are a good idea, because unless you represent a group of people, your opinion alone means diddly-squat, so I guess you need to get a heap of people sending the same message at the same time. At the moment some Christian group is obviously organising a letter-writing campaign about "intelligent design" being taught in schools, because the Letters to the Editor column of our local newspaper is full of letters of this theme. The success of this campaign could reflect the conservative bias of the paper, there's no guarantee that a group of aspies could get the same results, but who knows?

I agree with Sj�jungfru's point that it would be much more effective if everyone wrote their own letter. A newspaper can't publish the same letter six times, can it? What writers could do is recycle their own letters as much as they can by keeping the text of their letters on the computer and copying and pasting paragraphs and ideas from old letters if they are also relevant to new letters.

Hmm... I've got access to most of the Australian newspapers over here and can search the archives, but there's been nothing this week from what I've found.

What you say Lili Marlene is right, I think the best thing is to make sure that we know when something comes up in the media and that we can respond to it quickly.

I think this is a good idea. It worked sorta with Newsweek, I mean at leas they published part of a letter. Smile

And that's more then I expected.

If you live in the USA, write to your local newspaper and to your congressman and two US senators. Keep the letter to one page length. It is more likely to be printed in papers and/or read if it is that short.

Jerry Newport

Catffienated wrote

Quote:

I think this is a good idea. It worked sorta with Newsweek, I mean at leas they published part of a letter. Smile

And that's more then I expected.

I've heard that letters can be butchered before publication by some papers and magazines. They call it "editing". I think this is something to be aware of.

I think they do have to keep the original meaning and not have the words taken out of context though. A reputable newspaper would respect that.

Enigmatic_Oddity

Aeolienne

Amy

Wolfy

Enigmatic_Oddity

Lili Marlene

Enigmatic_Oddity

Catffienated

jerrynewport

Lili Marlene

Amy