Jim Brady and the Washington Post’s online arm have been out in front of its rivals and most newspapers across the country when it comes to engaging the blogs, teaming up with David Sifry’s Technorati 11 months ago to deliver blogospheric commentaries on their own stories on their own site. Now, even after the blog-fueled Deborah Howell and Ben Domenech debacles — both of which brought hundreds, if not thousands of unwanted e-mails from enraged progressives — Brady & Co. are pushing forward with a plan to bring even more comments to the virtual pages of WashingtonPost.com. E&P reports:
Washingtonpost.com, taking a bold step, has enabled user comments on many of its stories for over a month now — and the move has been deemed a success by the site’s editors. But soon the feature will be put to the test as it is extended to every article on the site, including those in the Politics, World and Nation sections. The comments feature initially debuted in the Sports section, with registered users allowed to post their own commentary directly below individual stories and respond to one another, as on blogs. Soon, the paper opened up the Metro and Style sections to comments as well, in addition to several weekly sections.
At the risk of violating Wolcott’s Law, I wrote at the time of the Howell controversy that the Post could cut down on flippant, angry comments by instituting comment registration. Many blogs do it, and it’s less cumbersome than requiring moderation of all comments. The Post has made a wise decision here. And they’ve implemented further safeguards:
A profanity filter automatically removes the more obvious abuses of the commenting function, but editors are still needed to keep users from posting personal attacks against the journalists and other commenters. Brady says that a feature where readers can flag abusive comments posted by others acts like a tip sheet for the staffers monitoring the site.
The filter may be a lost cause, unless they’re prepared to add hundreds of alternate spellings (and mastered 1337speak to boot). But the next sentence underscores why this experiment will surely prove valuable:
So far, comments have been both “high-level” and on-topic, says Brady, and in many cases the newspaper’s journalists have, in fact, learned more about issues based on reader comments.
That admission should bring a tear to the eye of anyone who has pounded the keyboard in frustration over the MSM’s frequently high-handed approach to bloggers.
While the New York Times hides its could-be-influential Opinionator blog behind a firewall and the Los Angeles Times has retreated in wake of its Wikitorial and Michael Hitzlik fiascos, the Post continues to solidify its place, as Jay Rosen proposed, that it is the best newspaper in the country.
(For the origin of this post’s header, check out the sidebar here.)
L’Affaire GoldFrisch: Part II
So: Deb Frisch, crazy, said bad things about Jeff Goldstein’s child, pilloried, also used as rhetorical weapon by parts of the rightosphere against the leftosphere. I was thinking it would take a week for allegations of hypocrisy to start flying back the other way, but everything happens more quickly in this fast-paced modern world of ours.
Glenn Greenwald is a relatively recent addition to the leftosphere’s A-list, and he got where he is today by writing posts like this reaction to the Deb Frisch/Jeff Goldstein controversy. By way of comparison, he makes an example of this post by the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler’s Misha. It’s not a hard post to make an example of.
Greenwald makes some valid points: the post he cites is appalling, and its author is not a nobody. The author is no more likely to murder five Supreme Court justices than Deb Frisch was to fly to Colorado and abduct Jeff Goldstein’s son, but it’s still some ugly stuff. Meanwhile, the nut of Misha’s response to Greenwald is:
It seems relatively unlikely that Misha would accept this justification from, say, Deb Frisch. And once the obviously ridiculous death-threat aspect is dismissed, it’s hard to tell what the “hyperbole” defense is supposed to signify. (Perhaps that if the author were not exaggerating for effect, he would have scaled the phrase “koranimal swine” back to the more moderate “koranimals.”)
Greenwald’s main purpose, though, is to accuse his adversaries of enforcing double standards: if Misha — a “prominent blogger,” as he repeatedly points out — is calling for five justices of the SCOTUS to be hanged, where’s the condemnation? Isn’t this a bigger deal than some deranged adjunct saying something tasteless about someone’s family?
There are a few problems here. Firstly, if we’re actually going to take all this nonsense seriously, a death threat from an “obscure person” made in regard to a member of another blogger’s family is actually more likely to be serious than the idea of a furious “prominent blogger” hanging five ninths of the SCOTUS from a tree. Also, accusing righty bloggers of “dig[ging] under rocks” to find Frisch disregards the fact that she came over to Goldstein’s own comment section, unbidden, to have her latest psychotic break. And, with the notable exception of this widely-linked Confederate Yankee post, righty bloggers tended not to require in so many words that their lefty counterparts disassociate themselves from Frisch’s burblings: Greenwald is engaging in his own bit of sneaky guilt-by-association here.
Most important, though, is the argument Greenwald doesn’t make: namely, that the outrage over Frisch’s comments quickly became a cynical thing: another stick with which to whack the other side, and a convenient excuse for people to say whatever they wanted to to Frisch in a spirit of utter moral righteousness. The reason Greenwald can’t realistically advance this argument is that he’s in the same line of work himself:
Right. It’s not clear whether Greenwald genuinely believes his rhetoric, but he can certainly mau-mau with the best of them — and it is, after all, the nature of the game. (Plus, it’s hard not to root for him when he’s going after the “koranimal swine” guy.) Meanwhile, as a bonus for the rest of us, the grudges fomented over the last few days will make things all the more fun the next time a partisan does something stupid.
The Deb Frisch fallout is just the latest bout of a great wrestling match that plays out in comment sections all over the world: holds are tested, leverage is exploited, advantages are pursued, and both sides spend most of their time wearing ridiculous outfits and trying to get different sections of the crowd to go berserk. There’s never been a better time to be watching.