This is not what is meant by balance

Today's Globe had several letters to the editor about the spanking article I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago, and three of the letter writers had clearly not read past the title of the article. They were consequently very outraged about a point of view the article did not, as further reading would have established, take.

It's dispiriting when letters of this sort get published. It suggests the letters editor didn't read the article either.

If a newspaper doesn't trouble itself to separate signal from noise, what is the point?