1A is a two-hour daily national public radio call-in show focusing on topics arising from consideration of the First Amendment to our Constitution – the protection of religion, speech, the press, assembly and petition.
And last week, the producers of the program removed the “comment” button from the show’s website, adding that it’s unlikely their to-be-remodeled site will have a comment section in the future.
The Monitor’s editors – as some keen readers of the online paper no doubt noticed – disabled the comment function of its own website several weeks ago.
Producers of 1A explained that it is “hard to moderate comments, and we have noticed that lewd bots have found a way in.” I’m not sure just what “lewd bots” are, but it sounds like a genteel way to say that disruptive and determined commenters keep managing to elude discovery in order to insult, harangue and pick fights with other, more civil participants.
Monitor editor Steve Leone was more direct in his excellent, carefully wrought open letter to the paper’s readers, explaining that by providing room for comments on the website, the newspaper had hoped to provide a space “where readers would be able to have a conversation about our stories that would go deeper than we could offer in print.
“Some website commenters have indeed used the platform in ways that elevate the conversation. But in too many instances, the comments section of our website has fallen below the standards we set in print, and it’s increasingly become a space dominated by a few voices.”
He politely doesn’t characterize those “few voices,” so I will: They are bullies. And they had, over time, driven people who were interested in having actual conversations – as opposed to shouting – away from concordmonitor.com.
I want to make it clear that I most definitely do not speak for the Concord Monitor. I do not work for the Monitor. I merely have the privilege of being a Monitor columnist, which mostly means that the newspaper allows me to offer my opinions on its pages.
And my opinion is that online commenting was a generous and idealistic concept that went seriously awry and deserves to be ended.
It all sounded so good, this business of generating thoughtful conversations among discerning readers of all stripes. The practice began around 1999, and by 2007 and 2008 nearly every publication was doing it, including this newspaper.
At first, for the Monitor, it was – as Leone said – like the Wild West, with the paper’s website awash with wildly diverse, even crazy comments posted by a raft of pseudonymous readers. From the start, the comments required policing, diverting editors and reporters from their core mission, reporting the news. And various systems were adopted to try to tame the beast.
Leone wasn’t the first to try to address the issue. In 2013, then Monitor editor Felice Belman published an exasperated column on it:
“How difficult is it to stay on the right side of the law?
“It shouldn’t really be too tough.
“We’re aiming for a civil debate on the issues of the day. While it’s fine to object to someone’s ideas, we don’t want commenters calling each other names – or insulting the authors of letters to the editor or the people quoted in our news stories.”
Easier said than done, as the editors of hundreds of publications have discovered. By 2014 or so, some started abandoning the concept. One of the first to go was – of all things – Popular Science, whose editors wrote that it was impossible for them to police the quack science that had begun infesting its website’s comments.
By 2018, the trickle of websites ditching comments had become a torrent, and it included at least one other New Hampshire newspaper, the Union Leader, while a relatively small number of deep-pocketed ventures – the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the New York Times among them – continue to maintain the practice, because they’re in a position to do so.
It’s too bad, really, that journalistic idealism – and that’s what allowing public commenting started out as – had to give way to reality. But the online community includes its share of bullies, and they’re instinctively drawn to places where, like spoiled children, they can strut their stuff with little or no intervention from the adults in the room.
That’s reality. I feel bad for the very few Monitor commenters who struggled to maintain a civil dialogue. But I will not miss the bullies who drowned them out, and I suspect most readers feel the same.
And for those miscreants among them who are the first to prattle about their “free speech” being stomped on, you could do with a civics refreshment course. The treasured right of free speech has to do with interference in free expression on the part of our government.
Private enterprise – and that’s what this newspaper is – doesn’t owe you a thing.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)