Is the marketplace of ideas self-regulating?
By Edward Wasserman
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)
As traditional news outfits migrate online to become dot-coms, one of their biggest headaches is how to adapt to the sprawling new frontier of public comment.
In the pre-Internet world of TV and newspapers, public comment wasn’t a problem. Broadcast news didn’t have any—aside from the weekly guest spot, usually some hapless civic association president reading from a prompter and staring terrified into the camera. Papers had their letters pages, but allowed only enough space for a few dozen a week, and they were generally written with care and were easy to prune for taste and diction.
Things were nicely under control.
But on the Internet, public comment isn’t kitchen table talk, it’s saloon brawl. Postings are sharp and rough-and-tumble. Harsh and derisive exchanges are common. So are personal attacks. Chat rooms and message boards routinely allow people to post comments anonymously. Only when postings are so egregious, so outrageous, racist or vile that other participants cough up hairballs do managers strike the comments and banish the authors.
That’s the cyber pond that traditional news organizations are diving into. They understand that their own futures hinge on re-establishing online the central role in civic life that they’ve played offline. So they are eager to host forums where people in the communities they serve go first to offer comment.
What about taste, civility?
