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?

Comments

Rules for hateful posting

[gbulmash]

I find it interesting that this comes the day after NYT columnist David Pogue responded to a rash of personal attacks and other stupidity with his rules for internet hate mail. Pogue dealt with the idiots with humor. The Washington Post had to close down a blog.

One of Pogue's observations, which is by no means original, was that this sort of thing is partially driven by anonymity. You can say the meanest, most unreasonable, stupid crap in an e-mail or blog comment, and there are no consequences. If you want, you don't even have to deal with the consequence of a reasoned reply or rebuttal.

The Post could employ some automatic filters to weed out some of the worst offenders, and thus it seems hard to believe their claim that it was requiring two full-time moderators to keep out the blog comments that violated their standards. Either those were some pretty heavy standards that made context such an issue that automated filtering was ineffective, or their web guys are pretty inept.

- Greg

The actual comments

[xochipili]

Looks to me like the comments, archived at the URL below, while biting and harsh, were not "hate speech" and had almost zero profanity:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/archive/2006/ wapo/

From my reading, the ombudsman was the problem

[Dark Paladin]

First - ever think that the primary job of the ombudsman is to find somebody a Bud when things get bad?

Second - it seems that most of the anger was from a comment that tied Abramoff to both democrats and republicans. Republicans, of course, want to say it's a problem for both sides - the old "Well, don't get mad at us - we were both bad!"

Democrats get mad at that because Abramoff evidently never *directly* gave money to any Democrats. Note the use of the word "directly", since Abramoff's firm *did* give money to some Dems, but nobody's found a Dem that got money right from Abramoff unlike some Repubs.

So now you get one side pissed off because of a percieved inaccuracy (and literally, they are right), and the other side feeling like they have to defend themselves (which they should), and then it's a flame war and OMG! LIKE THE END of the WORLD or something! Oh noes! Teh internets are on FIRE!

Either way, it seems like the Post just didn't handle their filter system. Slashdot and Digg and Kero5hin and a few others have the "self modifying system" - things like "anonymous users get lower views than registered users", "users can label people flamers/spammers/etc". The Post should have put that in first, or just put comments in a separate area so regular readers wouldn't be plagued by Dem and Repub fankids on either side mucking up the issue. Now, they have to throw away the baby with the bathwater (which is too bad, because babies don't like getting thrown into the dumpster. Or so I've heard.)

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Re:From my reading, the ombudsman was the problem

[orthogonal]

Democrats get mad at that because Abramoff evidently never *directly* gave money to any Democrats. Note the use of the word "directly", since Abramoff's firm *did* give money to some Dems, but nobody's found a Dem that got money right from Abramoff unlike some Repubs.

Close but not quite.

Abramoff didn't give to democrats, and neither did his firm.

Some of Abramoff's clients gave to Democrats. and after Abramoff began representing those clients, they generally gave less than the previously had to democrats, and more to Republicans (no doubt on the advice of Jack Abramoff).

Now, I'm not claiming the democrats are pure as the driven snow, just that Abramoff was -- from his days in the College Republicans -- someone who benefited from Republicans and in turn benefited Republicans.

Abramoff is about pervasive corruption in the Republican Party.

The sad thing is this: I believe many (not all, but many) of the Republicans who made up Newt Gingrinch's "revolution" in 1994, who put together the "Contract With America -- I believe many of them started out as idealistic, honest men who genuinely wanted to reform Washington DC.

But they got captured by the system. They had to become perpetual fundraisers to keep their seats, so they ended up spending nearly every day (really, ask any politician of staffer) begging rich people and rich corporations for money. After a while, that has to get to someone, even if -- especially if -- he's an honest guy who is living in a tiny DC apartment because he still has a mortgage back in his home district.

Everyday the congressman begs for money, and everyday he votes for millions and billions of dollars in appropriations. Eventually, these guys crack, and decide they want a piece of the pie too.

We have to change the system. We have too -- as the real conservatives tell us -- shrink government. and we have to provide for public funding of campaigns, so politicians don't have to beg for money and become beholden.

Re:From my reading, the ombudsman was the problem

[sammy baby]

So now you get one side pissed off because of a percieved inaccuracy (and literally, they are right), and the other side feeling like they have to defend themselves (which they should), and then it's a flame war and OMG! LIKE THE END of the WORLD or something!

For disclosure: I tend to lean leftwards, and most of the time will side with Ds over Rs. With that in mind, this is an example of how trying to go the middle route can leave you with the wrong idea.

Yes, it's true that some of Abramoff's clients (specifically, I'm referring to the Indian tribes involved in the Casino scandal) donated money to Democrats. However, that's neither surprising nor even suspect, although many find it distateful. After all, the tribes are one of the parties which apparently got bilked by Abramaoff.

The issue is that Abramoff seems to have been involved in money-laundering and outright vote-buying schemes. These activities seem to have included Republicans, and only Republicans. And before I'm accused of partisan Republican bashing, reflect for a second on why the dirty parties might all happen to be Republicans in this case:

1. Jack Abramoff is a die-hard, lifelong Republican. Why would he be funneling money to the other side?
2. The Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House. Why would you funnel money to someone who can't deliver what you need?

The sad truth of the matter is that the current state of affairs can be traced back to the Congressional ascendency of the Republican Party back in 94. Tom DeLay (you may have heard of him?) then started the "K Street Project," in which lobbyists were pressured to hire Republicans (and only Republicans) if they wanted access to party leaders, and to give money to Republicans (and only Republicans). Since that sort of political patronage is the lifesblood of Washington, it wasn't too long before the Democrats were more or less frozen out of the process.

Anyhoo: The Washington Post actually does have a quick primer on the project up. But for consistantly good reporting on the subject from an honest to god journalist who knows how to keep a good blog, you should check out Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. (Warning: Marshall is pretty obivously anti-Republican, but he's also pretty obviously completely fair in his reporting. Once you get around the sarcasm.)

Obligatory PA strip

[Rob T Firefly]

The maths involved are surprisingly straightforward.

Fundamental problems

[sphealey]

There may have been some profanity and unacceptable insults in those comments. It takes me 30-45 seconds each morning and afternoon to clear similar out of my inbox, so I am not sure what the big problem was for the WaPo.com site managers. Most of the original comments can be found here if you are interested.

But there were also two fundamental problems: (1) The Washington Post has printed demontrable factually incorrect statements concerning Abramoff, a lifelong Republican and key friend/confident of Grover Norquist, giving money to Democrats - which he did not (2) both the WaPo and WaPo.com (note: two different entities) utterly refusing to engage this question any any level. The closest they have come is to admit that their articles were "inartful" - when they were in fact wrong.

It is like the old problem with taking quality surveys: if you take a survey, and then don't do anything, your customers are left angrier than they were before. WaPo.com solicited feedback, received it, and then cold-shouldered its readers. Guess what the reaction was.

sPh

you do *not* know all the comments

[syrinx]

Some people are posting "oh the comments weren't so bad" with a link to whatever used to be posted.

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/discu ssion/2006/01/20/DI2006012000566.html

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. :)

Re:Get the facts...

[SeattleGameboy]

Casinos give money to politicians. They give money to politicians on both sides.

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.