Notes

Over at The Fresno Bee, they post letters to the editor on their website. These are the same letters that are published every day in the printed newspaper, under the following guidelines:

Please include address and daytime phone number for verification, and limit to 200 words.

The Bee does not publish anonymous letters, open letters, form letters or poetry.

That text is printed next to the letters in the newspaper every day, with addresses for both email and physical mail submissions. You can also submit letters through an online form. Oddly, the text next to that form is different:

Your comments will be sent to the editorial staff at The Fresno Bee, for possible use in the printed and online edition of The Bee. Your first and last name, as well as your phone number are required for letter verification. If those are not present, your letter will not be considered for publication. Please refer to our letter policy for more detailed guidelines.

Letters must be no more than 200 words.

And, inexplicably, the words “refer to our letter policy” are not a hyperlink. I have never been able to find their “letter policy” either, even after a Google search with these terms:

site:fresnobee.com “letter policy”

Those things—the two different texts for the same purpose, the absent “letter policy”—are not really a big deal, but they indicate that The Bee does not care about details, has no clue how to run a good website, or both.

At any rate, the letters printed in the newspaper are just like letters in most newspapers: if you want to respond, you need to write your own letter. I am only guessing about this based on my experience, since the “letter policy” remains safely concealed, but it appears that The Bee will print only one layer of responses to a letter. In other words, they might print fifteen responses to one letter, but it seems they won’t print responses to any of those letters.

Once the letters are published on the website, however, the Bee allows registered users to post comments, much as they might on a blog. This leads to long and unruly threads, mostly populated by some of the most irate, ignorant, and inarticulate people on the internet. Most of these commenters remain anonymous, using cryptic usernames instead of real names. And even though The Bee allows these registered users to create “profiles,” few of them provide any identifying information.

So I try to be different. My username is “peter_j_wall,” while my profile includes a photograph of me, says I am an attorney, and names the firm where I practice. I try to keep my comments substantive, nonpartisan, and reasonable. After all, with the information available on my profile, anybody who wants can look up this blog, my State Bar profile, the website for the firm where I practice, my brother’s blog (he also comments on the letters), and probably plenty of other information.

Despite all that, I dropped in on a comment thread earlier today to discover one of the other commenters—someone who goes by the username “Joe_Smith_60″—calling me a “lieyer.” And it was clear that he had not read or not understood the comment he was responding to, or maybe had no intention but to grind his own axe at my expense. I have no idea if “Joe Smith” is his real name, or if he is the Joe Smith who, according to Classmates.com, graduated from Bullard High School in 1963. (If the “60″ is supposed to be indicative of age, the numbers would be about right.) Who knows? His profile gives no more information and has been listed as “currently being reviewed by the editors” for quite a long time.

Fortunately, I suppose, The Bee allows you to “Report abuse” for various reasons: “Obscenity/vulgarity,” “Hate speech,” “Personal attack,” “Advertising/Spam,” “Copyright/Plagiarism,” and “Other.” So I reported, chose “Personal attack”—it seemed the most appropriate—and explained that, while I recognize the popular animosity against lawyers (there is even a recent book called Lawyers Are Liars), it is not appropriate for someone in that kind of forum to refer to me personally as a “lieyer.” (And it may even be defamation in the form of libel, though certainly not worth litigating.) The comment was removed, and now there is only placeholder text: “Joe_Smith_60′s comment is abusive and has been removed.”

But the reporting hardly seems worthwhile and the removal is little more than a token gesture. The real problem, I think, is anonymous commenting. When you write a letter for publication in the newspaper (and now online), The Bee requires authenticating information and demands editorial control. Lots of irritatingly stupid letters still get through, however, and I almost agree with Ed Brayton: “Letters to the editor are quite often some of the most depressing things one can read.” Reading the online comments on the letters printed by The Bee is even worse.

When the local newspaper offers an online forum for citizens to discuss the issues raised in letters to the editor, I fail to see why that discussion should not be held to standards just as high as those for the letters themselves. Require some authenticating information. Prohibit anonymity.

There is a difference between readers of a local newspaper using the web to discuss politics and a bunch of strangers worldwide using the web to discuss, say, the Star Wars movies. The whole point of going online to discuss the minutiae of the Star Wars universe, just to stay with that example, is to escape and inhabit a fantasy world, for fun and recreation. Anonymity is almost necessary there. But when people want to talk about pressing political issues with fellow locals, what good is anonymity? It only promotes rudeness and idiocy, from what I can tell.

According to my brother, who has been in contact with one of the editors at The Bee, they are “working on a number of things that [they] hope will keep the bad behavior to a minimum while keeping the comment system as open and freewheeling as possible.” I hope they succeed, but I’m not holding my breath.

Nevertheless, I still wonder about some of these commenters. Their comments are bizarrely worded, poorly spelled and punctuated, devoid of substance, but angrier than anything, mostly about “liberals” and “democrats,” which seem to be codewords for anybody who fails to agree with them. But I don’t even feel comfortable calling these people “conservative” because they seem too far removed from reality and decency and plain sense. A better label would be “seventh graders.”

I’ll keep trying to bring some stabilizing reason to the discussions over there, but I doubt the possibility of making a real difference. When being a lawyer means I spend almost every waking moment (and too many sleeping ones) trying to be honest and wondering if I have screwed something up, to have some quasi-anonymous jerk call me a “lieyer” can pretty much ruin my day. Joe_Smith_60 should hold himself to the same high standard and The Bee should refuse to put its imprimatur on a system that does not require people to strive for that standard.

The Bee’s editors are right: we should have “freewheeling” public discourse on important issues. But real public discourse should never be confused with the useless cacophony that spews from shrill partisan drones in echo chambers.