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Washington Post Shuts Down Blog
Billosaur writes "C|Net has an article by Katharine Q. Seelye of The New York Times, which indicates that the Washington Post is having to close one of its blogs, due to 'too many personal attacks, profanity and hate mail directed at the paper's ombudsman.' It seems that Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman, wrote an article on the Jack Abramoff scandal which elicited a storm of protest and led to readers using profanity and making unprintable comments, which the paper had to take extra care in removing. This was apparently more based on the issue at hand, as the Post's other blogs have not experienced similar problems." What kind of precedent does this set for other mainstream news sites? What we'd consider a normal day around here has to look fairly intimidating to the average newspaper editor. Will this dissuade news sites from blogging in the future?
Looks to me like the comments, archived at the URL below, while biting and harsh, were not "hate speech" and had almost zero profanity:/ wapo/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/archive/2006
Some people are posting "oh the comments weren't so bad" with a link to whatever used to be posted.
u ssion/2006/01/20/DI2006012000566.html
:)
That's because the comments you see being posted on other sites isn't really what they were concerned about. Of course, most people posting this apparently read DemocraticUnderground, so it's not really worth responding to them, but just in case anyone else falls for it.
Here's a link to discussion with the executive editor of the Post website:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/disc
See in particular:
Pensacola, Fla.: After reading the over 400 of the comments in question, which by the way, were saved by someone before they were removed, I saw no hate speech, one four letter word, and I can't imagine what you found so offensive as to remove them. Could you please explain exactly what problem you had with them?
Jim Brady: You were reading the ones that were posted live. There were a few hundred others that were removed the site altogether, and those would not be on the page you're looking at.
and:
Jim Brady: As I said earlier, that screen shot is only what was live, not what we blocked. There's no way for you to see what we blocked, and you should be happy about that, believe me. I learned some new words this week.
Of course, this is obviously spoken like someone who has never read Slashdot at -1.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Nobody disagrees on that.
What Abramoff has done is EXPLICITLY trade favors for contributions. For that, he has dealt EXCLUSIVELY with Republicans (and not a SINGLE Democrat has EVER received any money from Abramoff). Not only did he give money directly, he DIRECTED casinos to give money to specific REPUBLICAN congressmen.
There is absolutely NO EVIDENCE whatsoever that Abramoff directed ANY money to Democrats. The casinos were giving money to Democrats (and Republicans) LONG before Abramoff came along and they continued to give. In fact, after Abramoff cam along, casinos REDUCED their givings to Democrats.
How could anyone accuse Democrats of receiving money from Abramoff is beyond me.