OK, it’s time for The Politicker to have a comments policy.
We’d been resisting the temptation to delete particularly nasty, insulting, and scatalogical comments for a while. But one recent thread devolved into insults directed at a politician’s relative, so last night we knocked out that stuff, along with a couple of comments calling people “racist” and “anti-Semite” for good measure.
Anyway, here’s the problem: We have neither time nor inclination to play speech cop, which would force us to make decisions about what crosses the line, and have us spending our days arguing with press secretaries over what gets deleted and what doesn’t.
It would be easiest just to do away with the comments section entirely; the discussion can continue on Beadie Markowitz’s new blog or on some Yahoo Group. But we like most of what’s in the comments section, and we often learn from it (sometimes more than we’d like to … if you’ve got a really good tip, how about e-mailing it to me?).
So how do we keep the comments section empty of the you-know-it-when-you-see-it overly personal nastiness without devoting all our time and energy to policing it?
We’d appreciate suggestions. Please email, or post your — civil! — thoughts below. We’ll figure this out finally over the next couple of weeks.
