However, I must admit that when I wrote the “publishing anonymous blog postings,” I was actually thinking not just about blogs but also about commentary on mainstream media sites. I apologize for being unclear there.

If readers making comments are given the irresponsible gate of anonymity then all matters of bad taste should be expected to rise to the surface. There’s too many opportunists out there looking for mischief and mayhem. As journalists, we could all stay busy clearing the clutter instead of focusing on writing our own good work.

Clearing the board of ridiculous statements is just part of the work we must do to create a responsible press in an endless virtual world. It’s more work for each of us but it’s worth it in the end.

As the future gains momentum high quality online journalism should nip this open unfair style of communicating as quickly as possible in its own unhonorable bud.

On the contrary, I believe that the online media will be doing our democracy a very great favor by playing host to a return to civil and intelligent discourse on issues. On a certain level, our democracy is founded on a belief in our transcendent rationality. When people stop being rational, when their ability to discuss their differences in a rational and civil fashion begins to erode, they become much more easily manipulated (just ask any marketer) and much more inclined to tolerate and even encourage mob rule.

I’m all in favor of freedom of speech and freedom of thought. I’m not in favor of falling in love with the technology to the extent that you’re willing to be irresponsible, and that goes for readers and the media alike.

I think you’ve missed an important point in your discussion. Your proposal is sound so long as online is to be no more than print, no different. Libel laws grew out of a time when one way mass communication could not be easily countered by those libeled. Also, the economics of that one way mass communication created a necessity, economic if not other, to ensure what appeared in print was true and so my grandmother believed it if she saw it in print.

Online is different enough, provides a passage over those previous barriers, that we shouldn’t respond to the ranters and the libelous with print methods. So what if a blow-hard gets online and spews nonsense, libelous, obscene or otherwise? The technology provides a means to show that in a different space, without the inherent credibility of the older print form. And it provides for the target – and a hundred others – to respond within minutes…when a response is deemed worthwhile.

One of our arts critics took exception to the number of strings used by our Symphony and no less than the maestro himself responded with a wonderful explanation of how he’d agonized over the choice and decided to stage it as Beethoven performed it and not as he wrote it down. Meanwhile, a gadfly picks at another of our writers, eliciting comments from bystanders. It’s easy to distinguish one respondent from another.

In this age and online, credibility has to be earned. Why stop the free flow of all ranges of communication? We should be encouraging more, not less, finding new ways to represent communication in all its facets, not restrict the flow. Afterall, it was the printing press that made one’s words, written down one time, available to many. Online provides new possibilities as rich.

Mark S. Burgess
CEO/Publisher
sandiego.com, Inc.

What’s also been ignored in the Media Pundit coverage is that blog comments– unthreaded, and often unsigned– represent a step backwards for online discussions. The degree to which inadequate technologies are used by blogs is astounding. If media sites are going for quantity rather than quality just to draw in more eyeballs, that’s an unfortunate choicse.

See my further comments on the Code of Conversations.