Post blog closed because of profanity

[DoYouEverWonder]

Jan 20, 2006

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The Washington Post has closed a popular blog because comments on the Web site targeting the newspaper`s ombudsman were becoming profane.

The Post, which offers a series of reader-contribution sites through its washingtonpost.com address, said while other Internet conversations would continue, they stopped one that was discussing Ombudsman Deborah Howell.

Howell, in a recent column, wrote that Democrats had accepted campaign donations from lobbyist Jack Abramoff, when it is clients of the lobbyists who had given the money. The difference is the crux of the Abramoff scandal being considered a solely Republican one or a broader case on Capitol Hill.

The blog, which had been active about two months, was closed Thursday.

http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1077860.php/Post_blog_closed_because_of_profanity


LOL. What a lame excuse.

[babylonsister]

1. Here's a related thread from yesterday, from Skinner:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x185787

[hang a left]

2. I think we may have the real story here...

I respect Jim Brady, he's made a series of smart decisions for the Washington Post online that have really given the paper an amazing internet presence, far ahead of the New York Times or anyone else. But the reason he gave for shutting off the comments to Deborah Howell's blog is just absurd:

Among the things that we knew would be part of that discussion would be the news and opinion coming from the pages of The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com. We knew a lot of that discussion would be critical in nature. And we were fine with that. Great journalism companies need feedback from readers to stay sharp.

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being.

I'm assuming WaPo management just imperiously decided they didn't want to have a public record of opposition to the embarrassment that is Deborah Howell, and Brady was forced to make some excuse for shutting it down.

Because they had what, a thousand comments? For fuck sake we get that many comments on any given day and have to write our posts and manage the blog and pick images and do our own HTML coding and Redd and I manage to remove offensive comments quite easily, it takes less than a second. The excuse offered by Brady is so lame as to be comical, and anyone who runs a board open to the public just knows that people who show up are often not going to play by the "rules" you set up, in fact they'll break them just because you have them. To assume otherwise is incredibly naive, and using that as an excuse to silence your critics makes a complete farce of everything Brady has achieved in his online division so far.

But hey, I guess we should be thanking Jim for throwing gasoline on the fire. This complete disregard for the commentary their readers took care to craft, that they hoped to wipe from the face of the planet, has done more than I ever could keep the outrage white hot and active.

Update: Atrios said it well:

The Post said they wanted a discourse, but part of the reason people were rather angry was that Howell was not providing honest discourse.

So, they blame their readers. Nice job!

It also seems to be the topic of the day over at Romanesco, who quote Public Eye, the CBS News blog:

Nevertheless, the discussion was hardly one that could be considered respectful, or even civil. This unfortunate chain of events leaves everyone in the new media landscape in worse position.

Yes it's all our fault. Tisk-tisk. Oh those uncouth bloggers.

We are making some noise and it is being heard. The echo of these actions throughout the media world is thundering. Superb job.

Update II: Via AmericaBlog, we find our good friends at DU have taken a snapshot of the deleted Howell page. Better luck next time, WaPo.

Update III: Editor & Publisher is now trying to contact Jim Brady who is not responding.

posted by Jane Hamsher @ 4:33 PM


snip>

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/

[Robb]

3. FWIW, Robb's Profanity Round-Up:

Occurences of:

fuck: 0
bitch: 0
hell: 0
damn: 1
shit/bullshit: 2
Bush: 2
Abramoff: 322

...I reports, you decides. :evilgrin:

[OrangeCountyDemocrat]

4. Exactly....There Was NO Real Profanity nt

[twenty4blackbirds]

9. heh

:applause: "Abramoff shit damns Bush"? :silly:

[pecwae]

5. More whine...

UPDATE, 7 p.m.: As you might expect, we're getting a ton of e-mail on this, and while I can't answer those e-mails individually, I'll address the two main points being made, that 1) we're afraid of being criticized and, 2) that were no personal attacks, profanity or hate speech in any of the comments

On the first point, washingtonpost.com has done an awful lot to be as transparent as possible. We've started a ton of blogs, we've linked out to bloggers who are writing (often negatively) about Post content and we've made journalists from The Post and post.com available to answer questions online on a daily basis. So I find it hard to make a case that we're unwilling to be criticized. What we're not willing to do is allow the comments area to turn into a place where it's OK to unleash vicious, name-calling attacks on anyone, whether they are Post reporters, public figures or other commenters. And that's exactly what was happening. That leads into the second complaint. The reason that people were not routinely seeing the problematic posts I mentioned were that we were trying to remove them as fast as we could in order to preserve the reasoned arguments many others were making. We removed hundreds of these posts over the past few days, and it was becoming a significant burden on us to try and keep the comments area free of profanity and name-calling. So we eventually chose to turn off comments until we can come up with a better way to handle situations like this, where we have a significant amount of people who refuse to abide by the rules we set out.

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/2006/01/shutting_off_co.html

edited to add link

[zbdent]

6. Yeah, a freepturd must have been coming to the defense

of the cowardly ombudsman . . . (I know, the OBM just plain ran chickenshit scared from adversity, crying worse than Mrs. Alito)

[txindy]

7. That is such a lie. The Post is cowering.

They can't justify Howell's words, so they pulled the plug on the legitimate criticism.
Wankers.

[KamaAina]

8. I can imagine what kind of profanity:

Ms. Howell screeching "Awwww s**t! Those m****rf**king a**h***s won't f**king take No for an answer!"

That's the kind of profanity that really got the blog censored.

[Orsino]

10. Because the Post, of course, can only afford to hire...

...webmasters from fifteen years ago, who can't possibly figure out how to delete individual posts.

Baloney.