it probably never occurred to the professor, because he has near zero experience in on the factory floor, that there could be a mundane explanation:

in the original question, i used a reference to “lord of the flies,” by the time we put the package together, i had already used the same reference in the lee siegal interview. so i paraphrased to omit the redundancy.

jay rosen has a ever-expanding history (now three episodes) of imputing sinister motives to ordinary production decisions when the result is a story that a) doesn’t utterly conform to his worldview, b) isn’t the one HE would have done. i have a lot of respect for academia, but i’m pretty sure that the qualifications for scholarship do not necessarily overlap with understanding the nuts and bolts of producing journalism. alas, inexperience and paranoia are a dangerous combination.

for instance, while rosen bizarrely and incorrectly assumes i have paraphrased a question to somehow protect myself, did he not notice that i left intact and unrefuted the charge that i am a ROYALIST? and did not one single thing to soften the blow? did it occur to rosen that, up to a point i agree with ira glass, or at least understand his argument? that the relationship between journalism and the audience is a complex one, and that the dynamics are changing — perhaps most especially the physician-patient one that still makes a lot of sense to me?

no, it did not occur to him. because rosen has lost the ability, if he ever had it, to filter out his own scorn.

What Part of “Bomb” Don’t You Understand?

Post it. It’s not a hard thing to do. Instead of paraphrasing it and letting Ira Glass dangle in conversational space with lines like, “when you say that I feel like…”

You may be right, Dan. Maybe Ira Glass flew off the handle and started playing the “royalist” card with a man who was simply asking a logical question. Perhaps Ira did this to deflect from his own history of suppressing comments. Entirely possible.

Other speculations arise. But all we can say is we don’t know what provoked Ira Glass to call a fellow journalist anti-democratic. We’d like to know. I’d love to hear the whole interview with Garfield and Glass. Tell me how OnTheMedia loses by providing it.

A view. Which in my interpretation is informed by an anti-democratic spirit that Ira Glass had to call out. The host saw himself as reality checking an “alleged democratized online ideal.” (A quote from the show.) That’s the vanquished. That’s the quarry. That’s what our host thinks he’s arguing with. This “alleged ideal” (are ideals really “alleged?”…) is what his report ultimately wants to dislodge. He’s the purveyor of “heresies” to the crowd of deluded Internet believers.

They’re a construction; in a fact a necessary fiction in the piece. None are named, none are heard from. The alleged ideal isn’t actually described’ it’s just there be debunked, but we can surmise that it’s something like, “COMMENTS RULE, SO DON’T F*CK WITH OUR COMMEMNTS, MAN” which is the religion, the “alleged” power, to which On the Media speaks truth.

Among the people who have hard won knowledge about how comments systems actually work and break down, you won’t find many who are starry-eyed idealists unfamiliar with the lower reaches of human nature and preaching a rigid doctrine of openness. Practical experience has taught them otherwise. It was precisely this more moderate and practical view that the show avoided by declining to ask what best practice was. The piece is ideological. Ira Glass identified what they ideology of it was.

I’m not one of the people who have carefully studied comment systems, Dan, except my own. I have zero presence in the literature to which Derek Powazek contributes so ably. Never written an article or post about comments. I’m an interested lay person with my own experiences.

Nope. I am suggesting you should not have used the term “comprehensive survey” for a piece that isn’t. In fact it was influenced by the anti-democratic animus of the host, which at one point became so extreme that Ira Glass had to remark on it. A most unusual event.

And I don’t agree with you that while the OnTheMedia listenership is capable of grasping the problem of angry commenters and of hearing the host’s frustrations, a solid look at best practices for handling the problem is too “insidery,” and “another piece” and beyond that same audience’s patience. I don’t agree with any of that.

But the piece does not get beyond the old and obvious saws and comments. It breaks no new ground.

I’ve been involved since the Usenet wars of the early ’90s. I haven’t seen any solutions. There are things that work better than others. Care and feeding, with attention by the host, all make a big difference, but that’s awfully hard to do on a big news site with overworked reporters not necessarily able to pay much attention to comments to their own stories.

I’ve found that comments to my commentaries for the Guardian tend to be absolutely nuts. Yet, for the most part, comments on my blog are quite civilized and interesting, even aside from the fact that I felt the need to start requiring registration. The difference between institutional and personal would be my guess.

Derek Powazek wrote a terrific response on “10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments” in the OTM comments. In case you haven’t seen it:

http://powazek.com/posts/1063

No. It isn’t. Nothing that has happened to the news industry in its experience with comments is any different from the experiences of other groups who joined the Net and found the same things happening in their forums over the years. Ask some of the people in this thread what percentage of the news industry’s problems were predictable before the first newspaper comment board even went online.

A comprehensive look would acknowledge that and visit what is known from that history. We don’t have “the” answer. But we do know some things. A survey treatment of a problem in practice that does not include best practices for handling the problem is not comprehensive at all– not by my lights.

What you meant, I am guessing, is that looking at the range of argumentative positions on comments, they were all there. People who are ready to give up, people who are determined to keep them, people who have grave doubts.

http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2008/07/25/segments/104537#comment55938

Garfield characterized his question. I imagine if he posted the exact words, we would be utterly unsurprised.

But this nagged at me. So when I left LR and started MediaReinvent, I decided to see what would happen if I required registration.

Nobody’s commenting. I had two in April. Since then - nothing.

And I miss them. Even the nuts. I learned so much from the LR Faithful that I came to rely on feedback before I could write my next column. Now I feel like I’m blogging in the dark. It’s because of this very debate that I’m ending this little experiment and turning off the registration requirement. I can only hope that I haven’t alienated too many people, and that I’ll hear from them - the thoughtful ones, the insightful ones, and the kooks - once again.

Dan: No. Glass didn’t say anything like that. He said the co-host of On the Media was being anti-democratic in the view put forward by that “leading” question said host asked Glass. Which leading question was that? The one the co-host won’t let us listen to. Which apparently is just fine with everyone here.

So the OTM piece was a “comprehensive” survey of what’s known about the problem of angry commenters, huh? What a remarkable statement.

There are places where comments are a plus. This is one of them. Jay’s blog is another. But there are problems, to say the least. I just started requiring registration this week when a few anonymous posters took unseemly delight in Robert Novak’s medical problems.

I guess you could say I was being irresponsible before and now I’m being responsible. I don’t know. I do know I thought Garfield’s piece was an excellent, comprehensive survey of the good and bad of comments, and I will ask my students to listen to it.

And Jay Rosen beat me to it: I was going to title my Off the Media post: Bob Garfeild, Anti-Democrat, then quote from Ira Glass.