I think it is a sign of the weakness of the newspaper industry that even the Washington Post doesn’t have the guns to police its own comment boards.
An excerpt from a recent chat between readers and the executive editor:
Woodbridge, VA: While I used to enjoy reading the comments section of Post articles, they now are dominated by racist, conspiracy theory rants. The opposite approach is used by the N.Y. Times which monitors the posts and deletes the nuts while still allowing healthy debate. I think the Post needs to reconsider the anything goes atmosphere in the comments section.
Marcus Brauchli: We share your concern about the quality of some comments on our site. We do police them but rely in part on readers to alert us to offensive posts. In addition, we’re evaluating other ways to regulate the quality of comments.
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The Washington Post’s op-ed columnists are little better than those “nutcase” comment writers. We publish two of them in the Courant — Will and Krauthammer — which is an embarrassment. (At least they stopped using Malkin.) Then there’s a new Post guy named Thiessen who has been leading the McCarthyite attack on Department of Justice lawyers who had represented detainees. It’s hard to believe this is the paper that broke Watergate.