Bloodless Coup

Washington Post = Boo Hoo Babies

Loose paraphrase:

Gee, we got called on something and people are criticizing us on our blog. Some of them use profanity! And called us names! Oh no!

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. 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. It's a shame that it's come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.

snip

What we're not willing to do is allow the comments area to turn into a place where it's OK to unleash vicious, name-calling attacks on anyone, whether they are Post reporters, public figures or other commenters. And that's exactly what was happening. That leads into the second complaint. The reason that people were not routinely seeing the problematic posts I mentioned were that we were trying to remove them as fast as we could in order to preserve the reasoned arguments many others were making. We removed hundreds of these posts over the past few days, and it was becoming a significant burden on us to try and keep the comments area free of profanity and name-calling. So we eventually chose to turn off comments until we can come up with a better way to handle situations like this, where we have a significant amount of people who refuse to abide by the rules we set out.

Boo fucking hoo. Seriously. Oh, our poor finger got tired deleting the nasty nasty comments.

Welcome to Blogville, baby! That's what the rest of us bloggers do. We have to keep an eye on things, delete what breaks the rules, and listen to people say ugly things about us in public. We have to hear people call us nasty things and use profanity. Sometimes both: Asshat, shitheel, fucktwit.

Crooks and Liars:

Deborah Howell can misrepresent important facts that have an outcome on the views of millions of people that depend on the Post for information and that seems to be fine with Brady, but as soon as there is a backlash about it-he shuts down the only means to (outside of an email that will never be returned) comment about it visibly. Way to go, blame the readers for actually reading what was written and responding. They could have easily deleted the offending comments off if they felt the need to. Nice way to perpetuate the warm-fuzzy feelings we are all having about the Washington Post. Keep submitting those GOP talking points as news.

Steve Gilliard:

Mr. Brady

Your answer simply lacks credibility.

Why?

Because in the last 30 days, John Harris made a jackass of himself by attacking one of your own columnists, Dan Froomkin, and was roundly humiliated online for seeming to kowtow to the White House

Then, your "ombudsman" Deborah Howell, not only incorrectly claimed that Democrats had taken money from indicted lobbyist Jack Abramhoff, when several news sources, including the AP, said otherwise, she refused to admit her error. When Geneva Overholtzer was ombudsman, she brought a great deal of credibility to both the Post and to the idea nationally. Howell is fast becoming a joke.

Now, if profanity and "hate speech" were a problem, you could have deleted those comments and set up filters to prevent future postings of such words. The people who post to your site agree to abide by your rules.

Do you really think pulling the comments will lessen the furor over this? Instead, every major blog will now post this story and use it as an example of your inability to handle issues on the internet.

We are no longer passive consumers of news. We can and will hold your staff accountable for their reporting and commentary. If Ms. Howell repeats an erroneous statement of fact and refuses to correct it, it will no longer go uncommented upon. The fact that the comments were so vigorous was due to Ms. Howell's obstinancy on the issue. If she is unable to explain the positions of the paper and answer criticism, which Ms. Overholzer did, then perhaps she needs a new position at the Washington Post.

Because critical comments on your newspaper and it's reporting will go on whether on or off your site.

Sincerely,

Stephen Gilliard

And that man knows from hateful comments. Plus, he forgot to mention the Z-listers like us who will let our moms and dads, er, regular readers know too.

Jerome, Chris, Jonathon, and Scott just appointed me ombudsman of MyDD.  As such, I will now represent the readers, so that you have a voice and that commentary isn't as one-sided as it has been to date.  I have heard complaints, for instance, that there are personal attacks of a nature that is personal posted on the web-blog, and that is bothersome.  And uncivil-like.  I have heard that the people who post them, known as 'citizens', often come on to web-logs like this one, or web-sites like that of the Washington Post, and point out 'errors' and 'factual inaccuracies'.  

This type of uncivil discourse is not appropriate for this web site, or any other web site.  Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.  In other words, I have decided to close comments.  Greatly awesome fabulous web sites like this one thrive on criticism, and we can handle it.  But not, you know, on Thursdays.

We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it. Any thoughtful feedback on that (or any other issue) is welcome, and you can send it to executive.editor@washingtonpost.com myass@idontgiveafuck.com.

UPDATE: Dammit, how do I close comments?!? Curse you, internet!

Yeah, I'd say that closing comments and trying to hide from the rat's nest the WP made for itself is going to make all the criticism go away. Yup.

And what is it our friend the Stealth Badger always says? Something about "furry" and "butt"?

Posted by binky at January 19, 2006 09:23 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Hacktastic!