Comments on ‘Paper of Record’ Websites
Comments have been enabled on ‘Papers of Record’ since long before the birth of the Internet. A letter to the editor is in many ways the same exercise as making a comment on the website of a newspaper.
The difference is immediacy. I have never in my life written a letter to the editor. My wife has written at least one that I know of, by email.
One of my best friends was very upset about a journalist referring to the smoke that came out of a local industrial complex as steam. By the time he had handwritten a letter, he had lost his head of steam and he didn’t bother actually mailing it.
These days, the major newspapers are adding comments to their online content, with varying levels of moderation. Some appear to be completely unmoderated. Some are reviewed almost as stringently as letters to the editor. I strongly suspect that some are moderated with bias. When you get hundreds or thousands of comments, the opportunity to bolster your agenda by selective approval and rejection is tremendous.
A story in the LA Times about the Obama and Clinton campaigns has almost ten thousand published comments. I only read one page and it contained several comments that were eviscerating a previous comment that had been one of the many comments arguing that Obama lacks substance. It seemed a bit excessive and redundant. Maybe these are unmoderated comments. The TOS for user contributions are very exhaustive.
