January 20, 2006
Washington Post Closes Reader Comments on Blog
The Washington Post stopped accepting reader comments on one of its blogs yesterday. The paper claimed the blog had attracted too many personal attacks, profanity and hate mail.
The majority of the attacks were inspired by writer Deborah Howell's editorial about Jack Abramoff. The New York Times reported today that the incident marks the second time in recent months that a major newspaper has stopped accepting feedback from readers in a web forum. According to Executive Editor Jim Brady, " The article quoted Brady as saying, "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...We don't have an obligation to keep every one of those avenues open if we run into problems like we did yesterday."
What do you think? Was the Post right to close the blog down? Where does the right to a free forum stop?
Posted by Buzz Webster at January 20, 2006 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Comments
The Post editors were right to temporarily take down just that blog to re-evaluate how to handle the situation and to filter out the objectionable content. They were also right to immediately respond online to their readers about the decision.
That said, the blog should be restored as soon as possible to eliminate any impression that they are shying away from criticism.
It's their website. They can decide what kind of content is allowable is what isn't. If they choose to not allow profanity and personal attacks, that is of course quite reasonable. But they need to put in place a system that can deal with the inevitable flamewars and trolls. It's the internet, after all.
I have a longer commentary on this on my blog.
Posted by: rikomatic ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](/mt-static/images/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 20, 2006 07:29 PM
Hi All,
That is a quite obvious thing for them to do. Washington Post stopped accepting comments because of the comments containing personal attacks but again as per it said they were not been able to maintain a civil conversation.
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Posted by: stevedavid at June 18, 2008 02:28 AM
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