Last week, The News & Observer invited readers to comment on its Web site, newsobserver.com, about the proposal in the General Assembly to apologize for North Carolina's slavery history.

The results were less than enlightening or encouraging for the prospects of civility in public discourse.

"If this country is ever going to move forward, the NAACP should be disbanned, no more gov. freebies, and stop petting and stroking the black community," wrote a contributor who identified himself as "WASP73." "Their ancestors paid the price for them to live in the greatest country, they should take advantage of that instead of the welfare system. After 150 years you should quit pointing fingers and get on with your life."

Maybe there is a place in the blogosphere for this kind of vitriol, but I ask you, should the newspaper be the sponsoring forum? Most of the other comments also were opposed to apology, which is fine, but they made their points more civilly.

This snapshot of online argumentation raises anew the question of whether The N&O, as it ventures further and further into interactive communication, should allow input from outsiders to be anonymous. Several readers have pointed out the inconsistency of the paper requiring that letters to the editor be signed, while comments to blogs and contributions to forums are allowed to be anonymous, or pseudonymous. Readers justifiably ask: Is that not a lowering of the newspaper's standards?

It's a tricky issue that N&O editors still are sorting out. Their dilemma: the culture, as it were, of the blogosphere is freewheeling debate not constrained by calling-card niceties. The paper wants to be the go-to place in the Triangle for community discussion, and it wants lots of users on its Web site.

But the standards of the newspaper are accountability and responsibility. A newspaper does not want to enter onto the public record information that is false, slanderous or plain odious. The News & Observer is a respected name in the community, and biker-bar brawling cheapens the brand.

"There's a feeling that on one side, if you make people use their names, it squelches dialogue," said David Feld, newsobserver.com editor. "On the other hand, if you allow people to be anonymous, it encourages mischief."

Such as: The paper has scrupulously avoided naming the accuser in the Duke sexual assault case, adhering to its policy of not identifying complainants in sex crimes. But her antagonists in the blogosphere have managed to sneak her name onto The N&O's forums, unnoticed by the powers-that-be until too late.

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Last fall, a reader named Brooks Raiford offered an opinion about the Wake County school bond campaign on the WakeEd blog, attaching his real name, only to find himself and his opinion savaged by others posting to the site anonymously. One even went to the length of looking up the tax value of Raiford's home and posting that. "If your purpose is to offer a civil forum for debate, honest identification should be the norm," Raiford wrote me in an e-mail. "If your purpose is titillating bombast, you've achieved it (hardly an honorable mission for a legitimate news organization)."

This issue isn't confined to The News & Observer. Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz reports that anonymous commenters on a conservative blog site said they wished that accused terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had succeeded in a plot to kill Jimmy Carter. And posters to the liberal Huffington Post "expressed regret that the suicide bomber at a military base in Afghanistan failed to take out the visiting Dick Cheney."

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