Commenting on Comments

On Sunday May 24, 2009, the Dallas Morning News printed a piece by Mark Davis, a local radio talk show host, titled, “Unfettered comments online are just noise.” The gist of this piece is that comment sections on media websites attract a lot of inane stuff and that they “deserve to survive only in an atmosphere of accommodating responsible supervision. Any print or TV web site editing for lucidity will be doing its part to improve the tenor of public discourse.”

The first part of this thesis is certainly correct. A lot of “noise” appears in comments sections. But “noise” is ubiquitous in American media, even the Dallas Morning News. For instance,

Experts divided over direction of 2009 economy

07:20 AM CST on Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The longest recession in a quarter century is snowballing, and some analysts warn that economic activity COULD plunge as much as 6 percent this quarter and conditions COULD continue to worsen. Some analysts, however, BELIEVE this quarter MIGHT mark the low point of the recession, with the economy starting to show signs of improvement by summer. [Emphases mine!]

Who cares what unnamed “experts” believe could or might happen? Are these the same “experts” that told us up to a day before the market collapsed that “the economy’s fundamentals are sound?”

The American media sold out a long time ago. Ben Franklyn may have been the last genuine American journalist. Newspapers have long ago given up selling news and information in order to sell advertising (always nothing but noise) separated by filler. Talk radio is even worse. They have adopted ideological points of view, and inundated readers and listeners with mere propaganda. Their view of balance is to take what two idiots, one on the right and one on the left, have to say. They report the words of politicians without ever questioning either their veracity or cogency. They actively promoted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without ever questioning the fictional justifications. In short, their filler is noise.

Will responsible supervision improve the tenor of public discourse? There is not a lick of evidence to support this view. Publishers have been publishing books with content made up of noise since Gutenberg invented the press, and they all have supervising editors. Newspapers all have supervising editors. Noise often turns up in peer reviewed academic journals.

But there’s even a greater danger in supervising editors. The owners of many web sites review and often reject comments. How do they decide which comments to reject? Regardless of what the owners of these sites claim, how they decide can only be ascertained by looking at the accepted comments. When no serious critical comments are displayed even when the piece deserves them, one should be very suspicious of the integrity of the site’s owner. If all one finds is noise such as, “nice piece,” “great post,” “nice job,” give up on it. But publishers, magazines, newspapers, television channels, talk radio, and even web sites do the same thing. A medium’s point of view is often the deciding factor, and it never leads to an improvement in “the tenor of public discourse.” The truth is that we live in a noisy society, and the media have been instrumental in promoting the noise.

The newspaper industry today is experiencing financial difficulties. Many are closing. They are placing the blame on everything but themselves. It’s the economic downturn, it’s the competition from the Internet. They never attribute it to their faulty product. This family reads the Dallas Morning News from time to time; we canceled our subscription some time ago because just too many articles were either old stuff we had come across before or too ideological for our tastes. The paper has long been called the Dallas Morning Snooze by many in  Dallas, and it often contains a section called “World” which rarely consists of more than one broadsheet, four pages, and one article. The remainder is advertising. It has given the expression, “small world,” new meaning. When a newspaper or any media outlet markets itself not to objective readers but to ideologues and prospective clients for its advertisers, it has abandoned its original function. It deserves to fail. Editing comments on its on-line site will not help. Only the truth will set us free.

© 2009 John Kozy