The power and problems of those anonymous posts

RALEIGH -- Gentle Reader: And if you're continuing to read, instead of dashing off to madly thumb or pound out a vitriolic response to this salutation -- which is clearly intended as an attack on American values and eerily European -- you are indeed gentle.

We live in interesting times: newsobserver.com, The N&O's Web site, for only the second time in its fledgling foray into online reader comments, took down the readers' comments sections under a Sunday article about Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell and under his subsequent apology, reported Monday, for saying that Mexicans are trashy and breed like rabbits.

Apparently, many budding citizen journalists agree with the sheriff. Enthralled by this experiment in media democracy, they bred incendiary comments faster than even leporidae can reproduce.

Don't imagine that too literally. But before they were culled by the editors, capital letters and exclamation points and misspellings were a-leapin' around the Web site. Posters want immigrants to go home and stop playing loud salsa and driving drunk and stealing their jobs and generally ruining the pristine landscape of their prior lives.

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THOSE SENTIMENTS ARE, POSTERS ASSURED EVERYONE, JUST THE TRUTH and the facts, and everyone knows that North Carolinians agree. One poster declared: "If you read all of the comments ... you will agree the people are behind the Sheriff at least 10 to 1."

Many of the comments were, in the quiet term of Eric Frederick, who manages the Web site, "extremely offensive." The site disabled the comments section on those two stories. (The first taking down of comments centered on a "brawl at the mall" story in July -- another marvelous excuse for posters to trot out racist stereotypes.) Editors simply don't have the resources to vet comments before they are posted, Frederick notes. But down is not extinct. The comments migrated to another immigration story to reproduce.

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, is fascinated by the spread of this version of ethnic and racial defamation.

"It is remarkable how mainstream news sites in particular are being flooded with hate talk of all kinds," he said. "The most serious threats of violence have appeared not on white supremacist sites and blogs, but on sites that are thought of as mainstream, but allow for anonymous postings."

He sounds quite balanced for a vile lefty radical pig.

Yes, he was called that on the law center's own site. He's left those comments and worse up there, partly because he'd like to disappoint the expectations of the radical right that the law center would automatically move to censor speech.

Partly, he lives in hope of a "good dialogue." But he often wonders whether the center is doing the right thing allowing white nationalists to colonize the comments section of its blog. The theory, a solidly American one, is that good speech will ultimately win out over bad speech. It's certainly an interesting experiment. The outcome is uncertain.

Some are sanguine. One new media guru, BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis, has proclaimed: "The age of controlled conversation is over. The age of open conversation is here."

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THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE INTERNET, FOR ALL THE TRUMPETING OF THE JOYS OF UNFETTERED, noisy, complex democracy, is more of a force multiplier -- spreading harassment and hate speech more broadly than ever. Does the schoolyard bully become the cyberbully, or vice versa?

If I read an immigration story online in The N&O or The Independent or the Winston Salem-Journal, must I inevitably post corrosive comments beneath? Or even read them? Do the posters on these news sites, whose most mild language is "foreign invaders," incite me to commit violence? What role does CNN's Lou Dobbs play, when he claims that 7,000 new cases of leprosy appeared in a recent three-year span, thanks largely to immigrants? If I sort through three dozen of the online comments and find just one that helps elucidate the issue, am I better informed?

Possibly. Another fan of new media, press scholar Jay Rosen, says that, "sometimes there's a lot to discern in an angry, uncivil response, but if you're worried about civility you're not going to be very discerning." Can one cross a line? Yes, Rosen continues. Hate speech has to be "beyond the pale."

I really don't know the answer to these questions, gentle reader. It is true that America has a rich history in vitriolic, no-holds-barred pseudonymous writing, with Benjamin Franklin contributing as "Silence Dogood," "Alice Addertongue" and, of course, "Poor Richard."

Are "GoPirates" and "AREYOU SEROUS" today's Silence Dogooders?

Nah. Let's get serious. If you want crafted prose, you're out of luck. If you want a valid poll, go to Pew. If such comments help you understand that there's a great deal of bad information, bitterness and resentment out there? If the cure for bad speech is more speech? Maybe it's time we all whipped out our thumbs.