90% of Cognition Is Filtering

The Washington Post shut down one of its blogs Thursday
after the newspaper’s ombudsman raised the ire of readers by writing
that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to the Democrats as well as to
Republicans.

At the center of a congressional bribery investigation, Abramoff gave money
to Republicans while he had his clients donate to both parties, though
mostly to Republicans.

In her Sunday column, ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote that Abramoff "had
made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting
a wave of nasty reader postings on post.blog.

There were so many personal attacks that the newspaper’s staff could
not "keep the board clean, there was some pretty filthy stuff," and
so the Post shut down comments on the blog, or Web log, said Jim Brady,
executive editor of washingtonpost.com.

"We’re not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue
with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more
carefully about how we do it," Brady wrote on the newspaper’s Web
site. "There are things that we said we would not allow, including
personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech.

from AP

What’s the point here? That print media should stick to print? That
the real people behind the marketing of major media news cannot expose
themselves, evan a little bit, without facing the full wrath of the insultocracy
of the blogosphere? That the pathological viciousness of flamers inevitably
exceeds community standards
of decency, whatever the community?
That we
need
an intelligent
software
solution to
block "personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech"?

Certainly, saying that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign
contributions to both major parties," can be parsed in various ways,
but however one interprets it it hardly seems to merit such vituperative
invective. This kind of petty demeaning of public discourse is the second
most disturbing disorder affecting blogging, after comment spam.

Are we working on these problems? Don’t forget, 90% of cognition
is filtering….