Sunday, May 18, 2008
Anonymous posts allow true freedom of the press
From the newsroom
Carole Tarrant, editor
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Let me introduce you to the members of a hidden community.
Meet Roenoke, Ziranthia, TripleActionJones, Justafan and Georgia Boy.
These colorfully named people regularly inhabit the message boards of our Web site, roanoke.com.
After we post our stories on the site, these folks and many others step up and begin the conversations about the news.
They question a city council's vote. They speculate on a coach's decision. They wonder about the effect of a round of local layoffs. They tell us, very quickly, if our reporting fell short.
All in all, they rarely agree, but they mostly respect one another.
And amid this robust discussion sometimes emerges a moment of poignant humanity. Our reports on tragic deaths will often produce messages of comfort -- strangers reaching out to strangers, offering condolences or expressing the outrage that we often want to in public but can't.
This is what community is all about, whether it's real or virtual.
So who are these people who so expressively pound their keyboards?
I've never met a one of them. I can't tell you their hometowns, their genders or their occupations -- or, for that matter, their real names.
I don't need to know. What's important to me are their real-time, unfiltered ideas. To me, the anonymous comments on message boards represent a truly democratic snapshot of ourselves, one stripped of any status or "Well, you know who he is" sniping.
I learn from them and am alternately moved and disturbed by them.
But not every newspaper editor shares my comfort with the anonymity of these postings. Many are struggling with the ugliness that occasionally erupts in the form of racist tirades or personal attacks.
They have shuttered their message boards entirely or attempted to require identification (such as you can on the Internet, where there's practically no reliable means of verification).
We've experienced our own ugly flare-ups at roanoke.com. Online editor John Jackson has banned some users outright and tossed yellow flags at others.
He and his team regularly review posts after they go up on the site. They vigorously debate which to delete and where to draw the line.
The easy calls are the outright offensive posts, those full of bigotry and poison. But harder are those that attack individuals, typically those in positions of authority in government and our schools.
Our online team sometimes wishes those writing the posts would pause before hitting the "send" button. "They forget there are people behind this," says multimedia producer Meghan Martin.
Yet our message boards do a service by giving a voice to those who can't risk speaking out publicly -- to those who can't, for very good reasons, write signed letters to our editorial page.
Where, for example, can teachers turn when they are seriously unhappy with a school superintendent? Roanoke.com's message boards captured the boiling resentment that preceded the departure of Marvin Thompson.
In the best cases, our anonymous message boards allow people to speak from their hearts, without fear of judgment. We give them the freedom to speak the unspeakable -- to even express empathy for a killer.
Such was the case last week with a message board about Randall Lee Smith, who, before his death, had been accused of his second round of assaults along the Appalachian Trail.
The message board included the expected expressions of outrage that Smith was charged again after serving only 15 years for two killings nearly three decades ago on the AT.
Then it ventured into thoughtful and cautionary postings about due process and the inequities of our judicial system.
Finally, the most recent post, from a user named "liloldfashion," asked us to pause and look at Smith.
"Think about what Randals [Randall's] life was like no family no friends and absolutely no help after getting out of prison ... no requirements of getting any help. If they would have required him to get cancelling [counseling], maybe he would have realized his wrong doings, made things right as possible then maybe he would have been excepted [accepted].
"Instead he had NO ONE to talk to, wonder if he felt he would have been better off in jail at least he had someone around."
I'm reminded of an old saying when I read such postings: I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it.
It's a foundation of freedom of the press and should extend online -- though it may tax us and prompt us to re-examine our ethics in a new technological era.
From these anonymous postings we can learn, we can be moved, we can be disturbed.
And what is wrong with that?
Tell me what you think -- on the message board running with this column on roanoke.com.
