January 20, 2006 5:38 PM PST
Post steeped in blog comments kerfuffle
WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady made the decision Thursday after the site's Post.blog, on which editors discuss the paper's policies, design and goals, featured a column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell defending her position (registration required) in a Sunday article about fundraising scandals involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
The controversy began when many Post readers wrote and called Howell complaining that she had accepted Republican talking points linking Democratic members of Congress to Abramoff. Howell's defense in Post.blog attempted to soften the language she had used, but tried to make the point that Democrats had taken money from Abramoff's clients. Her blog entry was quickly hit with hundreds of angry reader comments.
A number of those comments included what Brady characterized as objectionable content, and on Thursday he shut off all comments on Post.blog.
"There are things that we said we would not allow (from commenters), including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech," Brady wrote on Post.blog on Thursday. "Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being."
But far from putting out the fire, Brady's move only inflamed some bloggers, who quickly began firing off missives on sites throughout the blogosphere, accusing Brady and The Washington Post of silencing critics.
"I'm assuming WaPo management just imperiously decided they didn't want to have a public record of opposition to the embarrassment that is Deborah Howell," wrote the blog Firedoglake, "and Brady was forced to make some excuse for shutting it down."
Further, some bloggers said they didn't buy the Post's argument that the objectionable comments became too much for it to handle, given that many popular blogs moderate hundreds or thousands of comments a day.
Some comments will return
"We did that for four days (and) we had two people doing it full time," Brady told CNET News.com, referring to his team's removing comments it deemed unsuitable. "We're trying to do a 24/7 news site. This particular one was just wearing on our resources too much."
Brady also said that over the weekend, the Post will put back up the comments on the Howell blog entry that were within its decency standards and will begin searching for a way to proactively filter out comments that don't meet those standards in the future.
"We need to have more resources in here," Brady said. "Maybe we just have to have a couple of contractors...We have to have a better system for blocking people who consistently cause problems."
But such comments did nothing to soothe the anger of bloggers who feel the Post's decision was really about not being able to hear criticism.
Meanwhile, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and the author of the blog PressThink, isn't sure he buys Brady's reasoning, though he said he thinks Brady is a "straight shooter."
"When (bloggers) with substantial readerships say (they) get posts with 700 or 800 comments," they routinely get some objectionable responses and are able to moderate them, said Rosen.
Brady said that while he shut off comments on post.blog, WashingtonPost.com is still maintaining 25 other blogs with active comment sections. But Rosen said that doesn't mitigate the damage to journalistic openness caused by the single blog shutdown.
"The fact that they have others doesn't address the loss of this one," Rosen said. "So I don't give it that much credit. It's not good for the Post, and it's not good for readers, and it's not good for journalism's own progress in the interactive age."
That's particularly true in light of the Los Angeles Times' decision last year to shut down a so-called "wikitorial," in which many readers participating in an online editorial became abusive and flooded the Times's site with profane content.
With the Times's situation, and now the Post's, there's some fear that other newspapers may be unwilling to experiment with open-ended reader participation in blogs or editorials.
"I think that's a danger," Rosen said, "but that's really a failure of nerve, because if in fact a newspaper went out and got the best intelligence it could about the Internet and chat boards and users...it would have been more prepared for this."
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for obscenities and reject postings for 30 days from those using
profane language. It will go a long way to cleaning up the
discussion and actually make some think about the words being
written.
I noticed that most of the problem comments were from leftist people. I did not see a lot from the rightist people. Could it be possible that leftist ideaology deals mostly with profanity, threats, hate, and other negative things? If so, perhaps this is the reason why leftist canidates are not being elected?
Ironic that Ted Kennedy who grilled Sam Alito for being a member of a college group that discriminated against women, was a hypocrite. That Kennedy was also a member of a college group that discriminated against women as well. After this being found out, he terminated his membership in that group.
Right or left, it is hard to trust one who is too extreme on one side or the other. Better to vote in moderates because most US citizens are moderate anyway.
The divide that has been growing in this country between "conservatives" and "liberals" are, i feel, between people that believe the major news networks and people that like to read a little more into it and think for themselves.
Just my opinion from my little world.
If a blog like redstate.org can censor anyone with an opposing view, why can't the post?
Chris McElroy
http://www.newsandmediablog.com where I don't ban people who disagree with my opinion.
In the end, commentators can post any darn thing they like, and readers have the ability to automatically filter out the dreck. If the low quality posters want to entertain themselves by writing dreck, then that's fine. Assuming the Post sets its default filter settings only to show highly rated comments from highly rated commentators, then few readers if any would be burdened by ever having to see trash, though they could if the wanted.
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(An older version of this article would show an obsolete bot ID. This article contain the new one)
Send an Email to bin_system_yserver704@yahoo.com
With the subject: accntopp-cc-E52488 (To confuse the server. After experimenting, I have come to conlusion that the last three numbers can be varied without affecting outcome.)
In the email body, write:
boundary="0-86226711-106343 (This is line 1)
Content-Type: text/plain; (This is line 3) charset=us-ascii (This is line 4, to make the return email readable)
credit card number (This is line 7, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
000000000000000 (This is line 8, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
name on credit card (This is line 11, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
0000000000000000 (This is line 12, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
cid/cvv2 number (This is line 15, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
00000000000(This is line 16, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
address,area (This is line 19, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
0000000000 (This is line 20, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
city,County,country,Post Code (This is line 23, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
00000000000000000000 (This is line 24, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
type of card (This is line 27, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
0000000000 (This is line 28, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
expiration date/and start date (This is line 31, has to be LOWER CASE letters)
000000000000000000000 (This is line 32, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
252ads (This is line 35) Return-Path: (This is line 36, type in your email between ) __________________________________________________ ______________________
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Heres a sample email: (CAUTION! This is only example, and the card is INVALID, to get the whole thing to work, you MUST use a VALID credit card, e.g. YOUR OWN VALID CC).
Send to: bin_system_yserver704@yahoo.com
Subject: accntopp-cc-E52319
Email body:
boundary="0-86226711-106343
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
5487542652845453
0000000000000000
Mr Harry Witford
00000000000
097
000
43 Park Road, Carlton
00000000000000000000000000000
Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom, NG2 2EJ
000000000000
visa
0000
05/2006
0000000
-------------------------------------------------
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