Comments in trouble again
I note that over the recent past something has changed in how the Courier editors are dealing with online comments.
Updates are infrequent, down to what appears to be about twice a day. This substantially reduces the capacity for dialogue, and probably frustrates many commenters, seen in the higher frequency of repeat comments.
I can't know much about the sort of comment editing I note below, but it has been out of sight for a long time, and its return is worrying. Maybe it was one weekend substitute that really didn't know the drill. We'll see.
9 comments:
Well hello Steven - Of course you know I have to throw in on this one. In the last week or so I've had a few comments "lost". Up till this point it had seemed that things might have become a bit more relaxed in the censorship dept. I even saw the word "shit" posted in a comment, not that I felt that it was appropriate. That did surprise me. But again the comments that I submitted DID NOT in any way violate the papers terms and conditions policy. After all I'm not new at this. So I know in my heart that it is all political bias, and that's a cheap shot for a paper to take. To be scared of the comment from a citizen reader says alot about the positions they take, and the strength of their convictions.
I still have to say that it's a bit of a jump to say that the interference is politically motivated. A simpler explanation is the reflex to use the power granted by the paper to control in a more general sense. Short of a survey of right-wing commenters to determine whether they're getting similar interference, the political conclusion lacks evidence.
Technically your absolutely right. Which is why I qualified my statement about political motivations with " my heart ". But trying to keep them separated and not jump to conclusions is a bit of a test sometimes that I fail.
I totally get it.
They usually have the same three people doing it. When they delete something of mine, it's seemingly for a random reason. Occasionally, I'm glad they did. It's anyone's guess. Some of the usual right wingers complain sometimes about censorship, too.
Tom, can you expand on that? Do you know who is editing the comments or anything about how they're trained?
A comment on the comments…
The courier does not belong to me, so I accept that the Courier can publish whatever it does and does not want to publish. I am also increasingly aware that the Courier is beholden to far more than the truth. I am sure the chamber of commerce has expectations and voices them regularly to the powers that be, and that the police department bends, delays or omits stories that are contrary to the spick and span image that is preferred by business and their own policing behaviors. Was there not a weekly police log that used to be published? Also, it is apparent that many of the news reports are simply announcements, where the “journalists” fails to ask the most obvious of questions when writing the story, preferring the superficial effort. It is a disservice to the public.
There are many things wonderful about Prescott and most of the people who reside here. My comments tend to focus on the things that are wrong, because they are the things need attention. I rarely comment on someone else’s comment because most of those interactions degrade into attacks on the people commenting rather civil discussions on topics. The comments do often provide insights and truths often missing in the article. I am grateful for all of them.
I share with readers 2 recent posts of mine that the Courier choose not to publish in it’s comments section. Not seeing my post, I re-posted with the same no see em result. I post them here as examples of the control the Courier chooses to exercise. The first comment followed a news item about some downtown issue in the square. I related a tourist’s impression who had been here for one week. She told me Prescott appeared to her to be a whites only, gun toting kind of place with religious freaks. Apparently, this was an unacceptable opinion, and so was unpublished. The second comment followed the story of the Embry Riddle student who set off the bomb on campus that he had made in his dorm room. In my comment I said I hoped that Embry Riddle practiced some type of screening of new students to omit the ones who were violence prone, especially given that Embry Riddle was the college that provided flight training and instruction to some of terrorists who bombed America on 911. Apparently, this truth was deemed unrepeatable by the Courier.
Thanks for that, SM.
Steven, I have had three comments "censored" in the past week. All three were commenting on what, in my opnion, were poorly thought out editorials. I try to be civil, constructive and substantive in my comments, so these were not harangues, but, requests for more enlightening editorials from the paper. I am disappointed in the Courier, even more than usual.
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