From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Some of you guys are jerks.

No, I’m not talking about you, dear reader, whose erudition and class I’ve always admired. And you smell good, too.

But some of you other guys are some seriously preliterate knuckle draggers. Exhibit A would be the relatively new message boards on the Web site of that great metropolitan newspaper, The Miami Herald. Or at least it would have been, before management stepped in a few weeks back, began policing the boards more closely and put up a notice asking people to keep their comments on-point.

Before that, the message boards, theoretically a place where readers engage in robust debate on articles and commentaries in the paper, were a sewer of sexist, racist, pornographic crudity. For instance, a story on Shaquille O’Neal’s divorce engendered an exchange on the basketball star’s probable penis size. A story on Cubans brought the “I Hate Hispanics” crowd out in force. A story about the search for a black suspected cop-killer begat a call for lynching. Which, in turn, inspired someone to respond, “Bleep the police and all of you white racist folk.” Yadda yadda yadda.

Frankly, the only robust debate was the internal one among reporters and editors appalled at what one called “vandalism.” I even received e-mails from readers asking me to ask my bosses to clean up our message boards because they were stinking up the whole Internet.

Not that Mother Herald’s experience is unique. Other papers that provide online message boards — The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, for example — have reported the same problems.

Read more Free Speech