Open Thread: Comments on the Commentary About Commenting

Here’s the latest bleat from the not-quite dead-yet MSM, complaining that anonymous commentary is somehow… what? Unfair? Hurtful? Makes you want to run home to mama and cry?

Meet Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg:

Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote a column in the Miami Herald last week calling for an end to the practice of running anonymous comments after articles online.

“Message boards . . . ,” he wrote, “have become havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.”

Ain’t it the truth? Yet, as I read Pitts’ piece, I was curious if he would implement the policy he had just advocated — nope, immediately after condemning the practice, he then runs anonymous comments, which seems odd; if he believes it enough to espouse it, he should have his tech guys pull the plug. It isn’t as if he needs to catch the czar’s ear on this one.

Readers fond of spouting bile see it as their First Amendment right, and cry censorship when decent people squeegee their repulsive sentiments into the sewer.

It is not censorship — censorship is done by governments. This is called “editing,” and if the column above gets it, why shouldn’t the remarks below? If I smirked at a 9-year-old boy hit by a bus, it would never make the paper.

Well, that’s probably true. In my 25 years with the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and Time Magazine, I wrote a lot of nasty things about a lot of people in my capacity as a music critic — all of them, by the way, protected under the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s historic New York Times v. Sullivan decision. I’ve been chewed out in the green room by an irate soprano’s husband, received two death threats, and once made an unbelievably famous tenor stalk off the stage at the Met after an unflattering article appeared about him in a national magazine — and, personally, I liked him very much.

And then came the letters. Here’s one of my favorites, which arrived by post very early in my career:

Mr. Walsh: You are the epitome of the world’s most nauseating vermin, forever spreading filth and disease amidst your footsteps.

I have been following your cheap sensationalistic journalism for many months and find absolutely nothing to commend you to the rank of a music critic. I believe you are a fraud in the worst sense of the world.

Some days your sins will find you out, and that will be a sorry day for your Mr. Walsh and a happy day for the Demons who will claim you as their own son and welcome you to the steampits of Hell with screams of fiendish delight! Woe to you!!

Signed… well, it wasn’t signed. Neither were a lot of the other letters I got over the years. But I must say I’ve cherished this letter, because someone was good and mad enough to sit down, type it out, address an envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it to me at the Gannett Rochester Newspapers on Exchange Street in Rochester, New York.

It’s certainly true that comments are a lot easier nowadays, and it’s equally true that — such is the state of the educational system in this country — they’re not nearly as well-written or poetic in their imagery as that classic.

Yes, any moron with two fingers can bang out a comment while wearing the Tarnhelm, and as one of the monitors of the comments on this site, I am often appalled at the depths of some people’s monomania and hatred.

Still, I reject the sense of Mr. Steinberg’s argument:

My column Friday on TimeOut’s April Fool’s issue immediately drew a comment saying, in essence: “How is it that this moron is allowed to have a job at a newspaper?”

If I had a dime for every time I got a letter expressing exactly those same sentiments, usually couched in terms of, “I can’t believe we were at the same concert,” well… you know the rest of the cliche. Journalism is a full-body contact sport, buddy — at least it used to be — so live with it. If journalists can’t take a punch, how do they get the right to deliver one?

So that’s what I think — what about you? Keep your comments clean — leave the four-letter words to the literary types — keep them on-topic and then express the hell out of yourself. Or at least the heck.

With those ground rules, your comments welcome here.