I am the senior producer of Q, and Debbie Pacheco has told me of your concerns with Monday’s story about Stars Earn Stripes.

Although the impetus from our piece sprang from the protests by the Nobel Peace Prize winners, as programmers, we did not intend on having two primary guests with similar ideas. We’d meant for our TV/reality TV expert to describe the show for listeners who hadn’t seen it, and then follow him with a critic to talk about the show in the context of American military-themed entertainment, with your clip as the strong voice in counterpoint to his opinions. As it turns out, our TV guest was more forceful with his opinions than expected from our pre-interview conversation.

I appreciate your suggestion of remounting the debate, but that can’t work given the schedule of the show and our mandate of giving listeners new and different content each day. We do a regular Letter of the Day segment, however, and if you’re willing, we’d be open to putting aside our regular format of having our host read multiple letters and devote a segment tomorrow to reading aloud your counterpoint view.

Our maximum length is about 2 on-air minutes, which equals a one-page letter. Would you have time to either revise the letter below to fit the segment, or do something new? Or if you’re too busy, I can also edit what’s below to fit the segment and send it to you in advance to make sure it expresses your primary argument(s).

Thanks for writing. We really do welcome your opinion.

Sincerely,
Lisa Godfrey
Senior Producer,
Q with Jian Ghomeshi