Online Ugliness

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 26, 2007 7:36 AM

One of the unique qualities of Internet discourse is its freewheeling, no-holds-barred nature, where passionate arguments are often accompanied by some choice expletives and a virtual finger in the eye.

But what happens when the talk turns ugly, racist and violent?

In recent weeks, some of those who post comments on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs have said they wished that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had succeeded in what the Gitmo prisoner says was a plot to kill Jimmy Carter. And some who posted comments on the liberal Huffington Post have expressed regret that the suicide bomber at a military base in Afghanistan failed to take out the visiting Dick Cheney.

No corner of the Net is safe from this bile. The Washington Post's Web site has been grappling with a surge in offensive and incendiary comments.

The really gruesome stuff represents a tiny minority of those online. But is there a way of policing the worst stuff without shutting down robust debate?

The comments about Cheney at the Huffington Post included: "You can't kill pure evil." "If at first you don't succeed . . . " "Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn." Founder Arianna Huffington wrote that "no one at HuffPost is defending these comments -- they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed."

The comments about Mohammed and Carter at Little Green Footballs included: "Can we furlough him -- just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?" and "Even this schmuck had some good ideas."

The site's founder, Charles Johnson, wrote on Little Green Footballs that such comments "reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them" and doubted that they "rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna's readers' Cheney-related comments."

Some conservatives and liberals seized on the incidents to denounce the other side, but no conclusions should be drawn from wackjobs on the fringe.

Since last summer, washingtonpost.com has allowed registered users to post comments on any news story. A recent report about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who said the slow recovery of his city was part of a plan to change its racial makeup and leadership, led to a number of offensive or inflammatory remarks:

"Some Black politicians are [expletive] idiots." "IF a white MAN were to speak as you do, you'd look for a lynching party." One person described Nagin as a racist and a women's sanitary product.

Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says he does not have the resources to screen the roughly 2,000 daily comments in advance. He has one staffer deleting offensive comments after the fact, and banning the authors from further feedback, based on complaints from readers. Brady plans to devote more staff to the process and to use new filtering technology.

"The medium allows for readers and journalists to engage in conversation, and to say we're not going to take advantage of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me," he says. "I'd rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all."

But Post reporter Darryl Fears is among those in the newsroom who believe the comments should be junked if offensive postings can't be filtered out in advance. "If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he says. "You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."

After Post reporter Darragh Johnson wrote in February about a Northeast Washington teenager who was fatally shot while being chased by police, some readers posted comments, including racist comments, criticizing the boy. Johnson says the 17-year-old's father cited the comments in declining to answer most questions about his son.

What is spreading this Web pollution is the widespread practice of allowing posters to spew their venom anonymously. If people's full names were required -- even though some might resort to aliases -- it would go a long way toward cleaning up the neighborhood.

More Charlie

For the first four Mondays in April, Charlie Gibson will have more time to deliver the news -- five minutes more on each half-hour evening, to be precise.

ABC's "World News" will air a special series, with correspondent Bill Weir traveling around the world to examine issues such as global warming and infant mortality. The project is based on agreements for a single advertiser, starting with pharmacy giant CVS, to sponsor each newscast.

"We're always frustrated," Gibson says. "The pitches come in every day and you just don't have the time. With this incredible luxury of time, we thought it would be interesting to take people to places in the world they don't ordinarily go."

"NBC Nightly News" was the first to air an expanded, single-sponsor newscast in December. Gibson says he hopes to do more special reports -- Weir is visiting places such as Zambia and the Pacific islands of Kiribati -- if willing advertisers can be found. "I'm curious whether they think it pays off for them," Gibson says.

Spinning for Gonzales

The internal government e-mails that left a long paper trail on the controversial firing of eight U.S. attorneys provide a fascinating window on how the Justice Department deals with the press.

On Jan. 15, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse wrote colleagues that "our new Wall Street Journal beat reporter will publish a story tomorrow" and "believes at least six U.S. Attys were forced to resign . . . I didn't confirm, deny or otherwise comment beyond cautioning him that he better be careful his sources are accurate."

The reporter had "raised questions about political motivations" and a new law allowing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to name interim prosecutors without Senate confirmation. "However, with all of the background information we provided . . . I don't think [the story] will be as politically focused," Roehrkasse wrote. "More likely, he will write that the department is pushing out USAs because they are underperforming or not embracing the department's priorities."

Roehrkasse, who included some "talking points," was largely wrong.

The Journal piece, by Evan Perez and Scot Paltrow, said the U.S. attorneys were "leaving or being pushed out"; that there was "concern that some high-level prosecutions may suffer"; and that "Democrats claim the administration is using a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act to circumvent Senate confirmation" for some replacements.

Perez says the Justice strategy "obviously didn't work very well. I don't think they stopped us from saying anything we wanted to say."

Roehrkasse says in an interview: "Clearly we were operating without the full set of facts in making tactical decisions without knowing the larger context to the whole situation. In retrospect, this additional information would have been extremely beneficial in helping us make decisions about what to communicate from day one."

On Feb. 7, Roehrkasse wrote to other officials that Kyle Sampson, Gonzales's chief of staff, who has since resigned, suggested "a clearly worded op-ed and reaching out to ed boards who will write in the coming days. I think from a straight news perspective we just want the stories to die."

That didn't quite happen. On Feb. 16, Justice official Monica Goodling wrote colleagues, referring to Margaret Chiara, the U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich.: "Looks like someone is trying to out Chiara and it may break soon." Goodling added that Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen had called and "said he was following up on a tip that a female U.S. attorney in the midwest was asked by Main Justice to step down from her post on December 7."

Justice told Eggen -- who was focusing on the wrong prosecutor -- that he was off base, without disclosing that Chiara had been fired. Eggen reported her dismissal eight days later.

And speaking of the Gonzales furor, three Republicans--Arlen Specter, Chuck Hagel and Lindsey Graham--did not exactly rush to his defense on yesterday's talk shows.

Says Jonah Goldberg: "This is such a stupid, unnecessary scandal. Not since some carny deliberately climbed into a cannon and shot himself at a brick wall has there been a better example of self-inflicted stupidity. Doesn't Gonzales need to spend more time with his family?"

What impact will Elizabeth Edwards's illness have on her husband's campaign? Dick Polman has this assessment:

"Here's the thumbs-up scenario: His determination to soldier on as a candidate, while coping gracefully with family tragedy, adds gravitas to his image. Those who routinely dismiss him as a nice-looking lightweight, or as merely a rich trial lawyer, might be compelled to reassess him. Indeed, Edwards is encouraging this line of thinking; at his press conference, he depicted Elizabeth's illness as precisely the kind of test that our national leaders are typically forced to confront -- his own personal 9/11, as it were.

"He said: 'The maturity and the judgment that's required of the president, especially in these historic times, requires the president to be able to function and focus under very difficult circumstances' . . .

"Some observers buy this scenario; talking to the Associated Press, Democratic operative Chris Lehane (Al Gore's press spokesman in the 2000 campaign) said: 'These are situations where voters extrapolate an awful lot about a person's character. Those who have questioned whether Edwards had the toughness to be president could well draw a lesson from how he handles this situation.'

"Also, under the thumbs-up scenario, voters will presumably embrace Edwards politically because they are rooting for him personally. In an Oprah world, few sagas are more compelling than the triumph over adversity; not to be glib, but the Edwards personal saga might well demonstrate that politicians are people, too. As southern Democratic strategist Dane Strother argued, the news about Elizabeth 'makes him real. It makes her real.'

"But consider the thumbs-down scenario: For John Edwards, the illness injects an element of uncertainty into his campaign. And that's not a plus, because the last thing he needs right now -- during this crucial phase, when activists are trying to decide who to work for, when donors are trying to decide where to send money -- is the perception that he might not go the distance."

HuffPoster Sheila Weller is more concerned with Judith Nathan Giuliani telling the New York tabloids that she had a previously undisclosed third husband:

"I said to my husband: 'This will be trouble for Rudy.' Not because Rudy's been married three times' -- people who've already approvingly slotted him as the results-producing pol and the antiterrorism candidate will excuse his 'messy' personal life (they might even find it touchingly 'human') -- but because she has been.

"And because, all along, she's been kinda, sorta, maybe revealing herself as . . . well, dangerously close to a certain kind of spine-tinglingly icky archetype that sets off alarm bells in even the most commitedly feminist heart. And that archetype is: The Bosomy, Decolletage-Trotting, Husband-Shnoogling, Gold-digging, Getting-The-Man-Comes-First, Everything-Else-Comes-Second, Three-Times-Marrying Babe."

The resignation of LAT editorial page editor Andres Martinez, who tapped Hollywood producer Brian Grazer as a guest editor while dating his publicist, only to see the paper's publisher kill the special section, is drawing some online chatter. Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum sees this as much ado about not much:

"Avoiding the appearance of impropriety is obviously a wise goal, but it's impropriety itself that we should be concerned about. The job of the media should be to figure out whether or not something actually happened, not to cluck mindlessly over appearances . . .

"In the case at hand, my guess is that no one -- literally no one -- think[s] Andres Martinez actually did anything wrong. I think everyone believes his explanation about how he chose Brian Glazer to guest-edit this Sunday's op-ed section -- an explanation that was simple, clear, quickly offered up, and consistent with the evidence. But for some reason the ethics brigade still feels like they have to go through the 'appearance of impropriety' kabuki dance because otherwise Romanesko and the blogs will come after them. Feh.

"And what does the LA Times get out of all this? A reputation for panicking at the tiniest sign of trouble. A reputation for not backing up its own people when unfair accusations are leveled against them. A reputation as a pseudo-moralistic prig. And will anyone ever agree to guest-edit an op-ed section for them again? I doubt it. You'd be crazy to waste your time, knowing that the Times will hang you out to dry at the first sign of trouble."

But L.A. blogger Paterrico, a fierce critic of the paper, says:

"It would behoove the skeptical Times reader to look past the surface, and probe what's really going on here.

"By treating it as a major scandal, the paper is setting up an impossible standard for its staffers. For example, as this blog post shows, Times Editor Jim O'Shea 'was married to a manager of media relations for Chicago's Field Museum' during his tenure as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. And the paper covered the museum quite extensively:

" The museum turned up in the Tribune's pages more than 1,200 times during O'Shea's tenure, sometimes raising eyebrows in the newsroom. . . . In April 2004, for instance, the paper ran two back-to-back Page One stories lauding the museum's efforts to establish a nature preserve in rural Peru. The feel-good nature of the stories, their lack of news hook, their unusual length for a newspaper (more than 8,000 words total), and their prominent placement all had staffers wondering if they were an anniversary present to O'Shea's wife. As one Tribune staffer puts it today, 'Why put this meaningless Field Museum story on Page One?' (Adding to the intrigue over the Peru series was the fact that Jack Fuller, then the president of Tribune Publishing, was dating a Field Museum scientist featured prominently--and favorably--in the stories.)

"My point here is not to pick on O'Shea. I'd bet that, if you looked hard enough, you could find similar examples th[r]oughout the L.A. Times building, of people whose romantic relationships could cause ethical concerns every bit as meaty as Martinez's . . . or O'Shea's."

And the next guest editor was going to be . . . Don Rumsfeld?

Some good digging by the Chicago Tribune, which fact-checked one of Barack Obama's books:

"In his best-selling autobiography, 'Dreams from My Father,' Obama describes having heated conversations about racism with another black student, "Ray." The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man. He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race.

" 'Not even close,' he said, adding that Obama was dealing with 'some inner turmoil' in those days. 'But it wasn't a race thing,' he said. 'Barry's biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull].' "

Literary license?

"Then there's the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don't exist, say the magazine's own historians."

Five years ago, the Los Angeles Times finds, Mitt Romney was singing a very different tune:

"As an abortion-rights advocate, Deborah Allen did not think she would find much in common with Mitt Romney. Then she heard his pitch. If elected Massachusetts governor, Romney said in an endorsement meeting, he would 'preserve and protect' legal abortion. The judges he picked would probably do the same. And then he said something so unexpected that Allen began to see Romney, a Republican whom she had considered an uncertain ally, as sincere in his search for common ground. 'You need someone like me in Washington,' he said, according to Allen and two other abortion-rights activists, whose group was deciding whether to endorse Romney in the 2002 race for governor.

"Though running for state office, Romney hinted at national ambitions and said he would soften the GOP's position on abortion. The Republians' hard-line stance, he said, was 'killing them.'

"Today, Romney is running for president and promising to pull the Republican Party in the opposite direction, returning it to the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan. He has renounced his support for abortion rights and has shifted his language on gay rights, campaign finance and other issues, bringing him more in step with Republican voters."

That brings his change of rhetoric into sharper focus, doesn't it?

The trial of media mogul Conrad Black is huge news in Canada; here, not so much. But Slate has a wonderful anecdote from the proceedings in Chicago:

"A reporter overheard Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, snarl at a Canadian TV producer who tried to follow her into an elevator, 'You slut. You reporters are all vermin. I'm sick of it. I used to be a reporter and we never doorstepped anyone.' "

And she's married to a man who owned newspapers, which we now know are filled with sluts.