Of Cats and Kids
Chief fans and foes agree: Free speech for me, not thee
Posted by: Carol Lombardi
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 7:16 AM
Whenever the issue of opening up our stories for comments comes up - and it does, frequently - I always bang the "people are rational" drum."Look," I say, "This is what is great about the web - people can have reasoned debate and everyone benefits - more speech is better. This is not just any community - just give people a chance to respond."
So last week we did.
We got a comment right away, as soon as we opened up comments on last week's first Chief story. It wasn't a particularly insightful or articulate comment, but there it was. Not too bad.
The next three e-mails I received were requests to remove the comment because the e-mailers didn't agree with it. Come on, people. They put the First Amendment first so even people with short attention spans could read it before they got distracted.
And then the havoc began. We were pretty much inundated with e-mails and comments from offended people of every ilk, wielding name-calling, whining, accusations and threats to make their points, which seemed to be that THEY WERE OFFENDED. Sometimes we couldn't even tell from the e-mails what it was that was offending them, but we definitely got the message.
To be fair, we did get a good number of reasonable comments, where people stuck to the civilized expression of their opinions. The rambling diatribes were not so bad; at least they were trying. Demagoguery was about what we expected.
I still want to assume that our readers know how to have a conversation, which is what I naively but genuinely expected to happen with story comments. I still want to assume that if these people were at a social gathering or in a class and some controversial issue was being discussed, they wouldn't leap up, get in people's faces, start screaming their heads off and then stick their fingers in their ears when someone tried to respond. (Psychologists call this the "online disinhibition effect" and it was at full throttle around here last week.)
Perhaps we should have been more clear on the ground rules. There are some things we have to do, and some things we do because we think it is right. No obscenity. No libel. No blatantly incorrect facts. No spamming (posting the same comment to every story.) No ads. After this little adventure, I guess I would have to add something that I haven't heard since kindergarten - no name-calling. (Can you tell I'm still flabbergasted by the name-calling thing?)
Ironically, one of the comments managed to capture the heart of the issue better than I could, so I will finish with an excerpt from that:
"Freedom is a tricky thing, folks. In order to have the right to be free one has to acknowledge the right of others to be free. Sometimes another person's expression of this freedom is going to yield words or actions that might not be in agreement with the way we practice our own freedom."
Comments
Carol Lombardi- You said it all! Thank you!
Posted by Mollholman on February 20, 2007 at 11:46 PM
A big reason for this problem, though, is newspapers have focused on panting for apologies when someone "says something wrong," creating and enforcing speech codes, etc. This is not the function of the print media, nor was it ever intended to be.
Using the First Amendment to deny First Amendment rights is simply wrong. Newspapers should stop doing it.
Posted by Wenalway on February 21, 2007 at 10:39 AM
It doesn't sound like the newspaper was trying to deny anybody First Amendment rights, but that the people who were making the comments were trying to do so.
Just because you don't agree with something doesn't give you the write to stifle the other guy. That's all she is saying.
A civil debate on any issue should be what we strive for rather than finger-pointing and name-calling. Yes, you can disagree with somebody. That's fine and expected. But calling for comments to be removed just because you don't like what they said is just wrong.
I'd like to see the News-Gazette run comments on every story, but if this is what they would have to deal with all the time, I wouldn't blame them if they didn't.
Posted by bretj on February 21, 2007 at 10:57 AM
