Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

A couple of days ago, the Arizona Daily Star removed comments from some stories. The move was controversial, as shown by the 232 comments posted to the story about the comment removal.

Star Executive Editor Bobbie Jo Buel said a few days ago that there may be restrictions placed on comments in the future. Looking at the comments that have been placed this week, either there have been restrictions, or the more virtiolic posters have caught on and moved on to another hobby.

I’ve been talking to a couple of folks about this move. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the comments section in the Star’s newsroom. The most amazing phenomenon was that any story, any story, would get twisted to be the fault of an illegal immigrant. The moment this happened, the “discussion” in the comments would turn useless. A crime story, particularly if the perpetrator was identified with a Latino name (actual legal status was unimportant), would be further proof that these illegal aliens were criminals. If a Hispanic was the victim of a ctime, than they obviously deserved it because they shouldn’t have been here. If there was a story about problems in the schools, then it was becuase of the illegal aliens that were getting educated. If TEP needed a rate hike, them darned illegals are leaving their lights on. Heck, if the Wildcats lose a game…it’s the illegal aliens causing those incompleted passes.

Particularly disturbing to some reporters was that even a Hispanic name on the byline would lead to a chorus of racial epithets and questioning of citizenship. I can see the reporter’s gripe, if your boss invited people into your workplace to shout racial epithets at you every day, that would constitute a “hostile work environment,” wouldn’t it?

The comments would often become a food fight and it was less and less likely to find anything enlightening in there. As the discussions deteriorated, folks that had anything serious or thoughtful to say would get turned off and simply wouldn’t post. Any story about Jim Kolbe, for example, would lead to snide comments about his sexuality. For all of the griping from people about “open discussion” and “letting the people’s voice be heard,” it is hard to see how calling a congressman “Tail Banger Jim” contributes to the conversation or helps people understand the news.

It would be easy to dismiss this as Star reporters griping that people were responding to their stories, but the dislike of the comment section was more widespread than that. One Tucson Weekly reader suggested naming the users of the Star’s comment section to the annual “Get Out of Town” list.

One former journalist I talked to said he did actually find the comments helpful, particularly on buisiness and consumer stories. In the work he does now, it was helpful to read the unsolicited, unmonitored comments to see how people really felt about local buisinesses and their treatment of customers. This may be true on some stories, but it seems that on many stories finding thoughtful comments became a “Where’s Waldo” exercise.

Back at the beginning of the campaign season, I attended a workshop given by the Star and Citizen that was both a pitch for advertising and an outline of their policies regarding letters and guest opinons. They told us about their restrictions on letters to the editor and guest opinion, and then talked about the on-line user comments section. I asked about the user comments, which at that time were already becoming defamatory and even libelous towards certain candidates. Their answer at the time was that people have first amendment rights and they can’t do anything about it. Given that this was said minutes after they had talked about the restrictions on letters and guest opinions, I found this answer disingenuous.

The fact is, the Star runs the forum, and they can run it how ever the heck they like, they can take it down even. They have first amendment rights too, and don’t have to promote opinions that they find offensive. However, they can’t expect to have used the first amendment as an excuse to allow their bandwidth to be used for this garbage all these months, and then wonder why users feel that this is a restriction on their first amendment rights when they finally clamp down.

I’m interested to see exactly how the Star (and soon, no doubt, the Citizen) decides to handle posters. Will they do what I’ve seen on Daily Kos and Big Soccer, two internet bulletin boards I use, where users who post defamatory missives get cited and eventually cut off by the users themselves? Such a system isn’t perfect (on Big Soccer, I once got “red carded” by a DC United fan merely for joking about a questionable penalty kick in a game that they won), but I think that giving the readers and posters the power to police themselves seems to have worked well on other such sites, and may be a good way for our local papers to handle such things.