Opinion: Media: Curbing the ugly Web commentary
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Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey took on online commenters in his Saturday column, ‘On the Media: Your words, your real name.’ In it, he compared people posting ugly comments on news sites to high school kids crashing a house party with reckless abandon.
Remember when you threw that raging party in high school? Being at the center of the action felt so good -- until a couple of guests parked on your lawn. And someone emptied your dad’s liquor cabinet. And an unknown visitor burned a hole in the sofa. That’s a bit like the dynamic confronting big news outlets that bring crowds of people together online. All media love the traffic and engagement that Internet comment boards draw -- that is, until too many louts crash the party, murdering the communal vibe and driving off the cool guests.
The Opinion section recently critiqued Web commentary as well. After the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the editorial board weighed in on the ‘unreasoned and intemperate Web commentary.’
Within minutes, hundreds of commenters were at work across the Web loudly seeking to appropriate the story for their own purposes, in many cases fanning it for maximum fear, and injecting it into the roiling narrative of anger, partisanship and paranoia that has taken over so much of the national political conversation.
Our Opinion section is lucky enough to attract a good amount of thoughtful readers who -- though we don’t always agree with them -- add to the conversation.
Of course, there are exceptions, usually surrounding the topic of illegal immigration, when the comments become vile. We take these comments down, but perhaps Rainey’s solution is better: ‘Why not even require online guests to post comments under their real names -- as newspapers have required letter writers to do for decades?’
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-- Alexandra Le Tellier
