Miscommentary

Lately I have this bee in my bonnet or maybe more like a bug in my shoe about comments posted by readers on news sites. I like to go to a couple different news sites to get different perspectives on stories and for some reason I am fascinated not only by the comments people leave but by the comments that are allowed. So I have researched comment behaviors at a handful of news outlets, though certainly not expansive enough to be scientific it did allow some insight. 

You might think that reader comments would be akin letters to the editor, but from what I can tell that is not true. Letters to the Editor appear to be controlled. For example, a paper wouldn’t typically print multiple letters to the editor that say essentially the same thing. They are edited for content and grammar and other journalistic standards.

But not comments. They are a free for all. The only thing I can tell that is not allowed are offensive words. (Granted there was one news site that appeared to apply Letter to the Editor standards to its comments).

Of course there are different types of commenters. The serious commenter tying to make a point about an article, pro or con. The Class Clown who just belittles everything in the article in an effort to be funny. Mr Sarcasm who just mocks the other the other commenters. The Fencer who likes to spar with other commenters. The Politico who turns every article on anything into a comment on either republicans or democrats. And of course for sports articles the Monday Morning Quarterback.

The deafening amount of noise and chatter just washes away in a  tide of blather any earnest commentary. So in effect the comment feature that the news outlets tout as valid reader response becomes just nonsensical.

Now there was that one site that seemed to control reader comments (or their readers were extremely disciplined and courteous, which I doubt). But that means that some employee was monitoring and making decisions, the type of employee that probably doesn’t exist anymore at most news outlets. Though perhaps the news outlets that choose not to have comments at all are the ones I should be supporting since they are clearly not trying to convince me that these reader comments have any journalistic value. But maybe comments are like publicity.

As a last point what seems to be interesting is that if you go out and look at numerous blogs (not associated withe major news outlets) you seem to find that comments seem to stay on target. But perhaps that has to do with the volume of readership and the more targeted audience.

That being said, I will accept no blathering comments on my blog. Unless of course they are really funny.

This entry was posted on 3. September 2008 at 09:45 and is filed under Permusations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.