By Aly Colón
Reporting, Writing, Editing Group Leader
How
does uncensored, uncivil and anonymous commentary on blogs and Web sites affect
online conversations about diversity?
We
asked contributors to Poynter’s “Journalism with a Difference” column,
along with some other journalists who deal with diversity issues, to e-mail us
their thoughts.
Here
are their responses:
Sally Lehrman, national diversity chair, Society of Professional
Journalists:
Some of the hostility does give us a sense of
where people really are with these issues because they feel a freedom to say
things they would never share in public. That can help keep the conversation
going in a way that doesn’t let anyone throw up their hands in disgust. I’ve
found this with some of my race and science stories — on some blogs, some very
interesting back and forth ensues in which one writer will correct another on
the ignorance, stereotyping or assumptions behind whatever they’ve said.
When I’m having conversations with people one on
one, I often hear a great deal of anger leaking out, as well as some
shallowness in thinking. If we could figure out a way to create a safe place to
express fears and misunderstandings, the discussion about diversity could go
much further.
Personal attacks, though, are scary and should
be zapped, especially when they start snowballing.
Ricardo Pimentel, editorial page editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
As
a target of “uncivil” commentary from time to time, I’ve realized that they
have their uses.
- It tells me that I’ve
hit some buttons. - It tells me that,
because there are haters out there, it is all the more important to be a
non-hater, and to get your commentary read. Validation, in other words. - These are genuine
feelings coming from folks who are part of the body politic, like it or
not.
Generally,
however, the question perhaps supposes that we can get that genie, loose on the
Internet for a while now, back into the bottle. There are different rules out
there now that we should learn to adapt to, rather than asking whether we can
or should tame it, to make it sound like us.
I’m
not saying that we should become uncivil in our commentary or news. But I am
saying that perhaps editorial speak, as we now know it, will change. We will be
edgier, more immediate, shorter. The trick will be to make it remain relevant
and fact-based.
Phillip J. Milano, writer, “Dare to Ask” column, and The
Florida Times-Union communities editor:
I’ve
always tried to distinguish between “hostility” in online commentary and
outright “hate.”
Over
the last nine years of doing my cross-cultural diversity dialogue project, I’ve decided to allow “hostile” commentary if it appears that the person making the posting is at
least interested in furthering the conversation in some way. Haters, by
contrast, just want to post their hateful commentary and get out, with no
interest in how people might respond.
I
think we have to allow hostile commentary (again, commentary that still may
have redeeming value if it furthers a conversation), or we will not be offering
an accurate picture of how people really think and feel about certain topics in
this country. And to not know how people really feel (even if that commentary
is insensitive at times) is dangerous. We can’t afford to have only inoffensive
commentary posted. We need to know who’s out there and what they are thinking.
Eric Deggans, TV/media critic, St. Petersburg Times:
I have
struggled with this quite a bit in maintaining my own media blog for my
employer, the St. Petersburg Times.
From
the beginning, I formatted my blog so that any comment is immediately e-mailed
to me. I can usually make a decision on keeping the comment within an
hour.
Initially, I
avoided deleting comments to preserve the free flow of ideas. But I
soon discovered all that did was allow the knuckleheads to dominate the
conversation with pointless insults and awfully racist rhetoric. I began
to feel it was stupid to allow something on which I work so hard to become
a billboard for racist comments about me.
So
I set new ground rules, basically saying any racist humor gets deleted.
Any personal insults, especially about me, also get deleted. The
Times‘ Web people helped me out by drafting a code of conduct for commenters,
which is now posted on the left-hand rail for all our blogs.
Basically
my approach is that this is my editorial space. And while I’m willing to let
people have their say, even if they don’t agree with me, I’m not willing to let
them be abusive jerks. And if they have a problem with that, there’s
59,999,999 other blogs where they can take their perspective.
Terry Mattingly, co-founder of the GetReligion.org blog:
The key, for me, is that many of our
GetReligion.org
readers want to argue about what divides them — religious doctrine — when the
purpose of our site is to focus on a very specific journalistic theme, which is
what the MSM (mainstream media) get right and what they get wrong on religion
coverage.
Also, so many angry religious
believers — primarily conservative Christians — sincerely dislike, or even hate,
journalism. Now, our site does more than its share of criticizing the press,
but we are starting out from a positive position. We believe that journalism
will be improved by people who love it, rather than hate it.
I am afraid that all of this has to do with the
niche media realities of the World Wide Web. Like old-continent European
journalism, it is easier to command a small audience advocating a narrow point
of view than it is to do media that tries to cover a wide spectrum of bases.
So what happens when niche partisans read
mainstream newspaper online sites? You get busy copy editors, working around
the clock trying to maintain sanity and some degree of civility in the comment
boxes.
Susan
LoTempio, assistant managing editor/readership, The Buffalo (N.Y.) News:
At
The Buffalo News, we are still so new in this area of online comments
that we haven’t even begun to track the issue. Part of the reason is that
we don’t yet have the software to elicit comments on local news stories
and columns.
All reader comments come from our blogs, and we’ve already started to see
hateful comments on the blogs that are personally directed at our writers
and people in the community. Our columnist who deals with issues in the
local African-American community receives very troubling letters and
e-mails, and we are very concerned what will be posted when we open his
column to comments. Many of us in the newsroom feel that if comments had to
include the writers’ names, that would help to control racist and hateful
remarks.
