CBS Allows Comments on All Candidates Except Obama

I just read over at Romanesko that CBSNews.com has made an unfortunate decision about comments on its online news pages. Apparently they’ve been experiencing an influx of racist comments on pages featuring stories about Democratic Presidential hopeful Barak Obama. As a result, CBS decided to turn off comments on all online stories about Obama. I can certainly understand the problem here. News organizations all over, in their rush to attempt to be social media sites, are having problems with hostile comments.

The issue I have with the decision is that they are leaving comments ON for ever other candidate. This creates a disparity in the free exchange of ideas. On CBS, at least, Obama becomes somewhat untouchable. I understand the network not wanting racist comments seen on their website, but in turning off the comments for Obama, they’ve not only eliminated the racist negativity but also the opportunity for people with legitimate gripes on his political stances to be heard.

Here’s an excerpt from a post about this on the CBS blog Public Eye:

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to “the volume and the persistence” of the objectionable comments.

CBSNews.com has no plans to disable comments on stories about the other presidential candidates, according to Sims. As for comments on Obama stories, he said the site is open to eventually bringing them back.

“We’d like to be able to return to them, and I’m not ruling that out,” said Sims. “But at this point it’s not possible.”

The logical thing to do, if they don’t have the resources to screen every comment for racism, would be to eliminate all comments about every presidential candidate. All they’ve done here, I think, is opened themselves up to screams of media bias.

The amusing part about this is that the comments on the Public Eye blog post have now turned into a shouting match about Republicans causing the problem because they’re all racists. Way to discuss the issues, people.

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