Southern Illinois' Daily Egyptian ices reader comments

This is completely understandable. People are stupid.

 

Couldn't help but laugh a little at this tagline at the end of her column:

 

If you kill the comments, your traffic numbers will take a big hit as well.

Think of it as a sports bar where only the owner gets to talk. You probably go get a beer somewhere else where the conversation is better ...

 

Bullshit. Free speech is about making an opinion and having the balls to sign your name and address to it.
Anonymous internet comments and message boards are two of the reasons society has gone to hell. Newspapers that allow reader comments are whores.

 

This week's stop on the Bad Analogies Tour has a new leader in the clubhouse, I think.

 

If papers started posting pornography on their front pages, I'm sure traffic would go WAY up.

Does that mean newspapers should be a forum for pornography?

(Also a bad analogy, admittedly.)

 

I will say, though, that the tangent on the individuals who have died who worked at the newspaper and their families was a bit of a reach.

 

mmmhmm.

 

Virtually everyone in history who has ever had an important opinion on free speech would disagree.

 

And from what I can see on some other newspapers' message boards, getting stupider by the minute.

Maybe we should, as an industry, rethink and/or remove message boards, since all they seem to encourage is rampant stupidity.

 

You have a right to free speech.
You do not have a right to every conceivable platform.

 

Yes, they are. I wish our paper had the guts as well. Personally attacking high school kids? Never a good thing.