no surprisingly, Jack Shafer is full of shit.   There was no  pack of "commenters" who descended upon the Post Web site, stirred on by various blogs, to record ugly and obscene comments.  Didn't happen.  No one, not even Michele Malkin, saw it.   (and Shafer should read this http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/27/ 22034/6577 before lying about the on-line community again.)

A "pack" of critical, well informed commenters descended on the post.blog, asking questions that the Post couldn't answer, and it was becoming a major embarrassment for the Post, so Brady erased all the comments, then claimed it was because they were "deluged" with profanity.  Unfortunately, Brady didn't anticipate that people would have actually saved the comments threads, and shown him up to be a liar.   So Brady decides to restore some of the comments, but not restore a whole bunch that made substantive points that the Post could not answer.  

Jack, Regarding this statement:

"I never, ever have called bloggers rioters. The "riot" to which I referred was the pack of "commenters" who descended upon the Post Web site, stirred on by various blogs, to record ugly and obscene comments. I wasn't referring to what bloggers wrote about her on their sites."

I hope I'm not far off the mark in thinking that this sort of contempt directed broadly  toward "commenters" is as offensive to liberal bloggers as the more directed insult would have been.

Jack, I'm a fan of yours; read your column in Slate every week.  But, you blew it this time -- the incivility has been hyped wildly out of context -- as you should know from the Fray at Slate, some incivility (and there can be quite at bit in the Fray) does not mean that the rest of the comments are not valid.  The real problem from my point of view is that the Post has drafted their fellow journalists in their effort to change the subject: they did very sloppy work, feeding right into a wildly misleading Republican talking point.  That makes people upset; if some are incivil about it, delete them, but why on earth are we talking about what a bunch of commenters wrote on a blog, when we should be talking about what the Post wrote, and the deliberate corruption the Republicans have been flagrantly instituting for the last 5 yrs?

The Post is desperately trying to change the subject, and you helped them.  I think professional solidarity clouded your judgement on this one....

I'm sorry I missed you.  I was actually the last one in the room, along with Aravosis, Rebecca, and one other person.  Drop me an email, and we can get coffee or something.

jack, you'd be surprised (tho most of us wouldn't) to know that a great number of the "riotous" commenters are also bloggers.

and tho blogging on your own site every day is different than commenting on someone else's site, it's not that different, not really.

i'm sure you are ignoring plukasiak's admonishing to read jukeboxgrad's dkos diary, with it's timeline of exactly what comments were posted, when, how, and what, when and how were deleted, then re-posted, then deleted again.

(i say i'm sure you're ignoring plukasiak, because i noticed he started his post with a profanity and personal attack...which is what happens when the msm ignores the facts.  we bloggers get understandably frustrated.)

i implore you, read the diary.  carefully.  among other facts, you'll see that jukeboxgrad found out that the "uncivility rate" was something along the lines of 1.7%...and that the term "personal attacks" was ill-defined, and that the "rules of conduct" that washpost.com cited as reasons for deleting the comments were hard to find and harder to link to, so other people could find it.

in other words, the washington post was continually (a) wrong in its facts (b) disengenuous in its approach and (c) condescending in its attitude.  it's no wonder people got frustrated, passionate, and at times, uncivil.

if you (the main stream press) are going to continually beat the family dog, don't be surprised when it bites you.  but if you want to engage in actual dialogue, you will find that 100% of netroots bloggers and commmenters are simply human beings, and that will run the gamut of a wide range of responses and expectations.

please deal with that fact.

And salvaging from various caches I can only recall one comment that I would have deleted. It had no particularly content and described Howell (if I recall right) as "a lying little bitch". Obviously this was inappropriate, would never have been printed in a regular Letters to the Editor piece, but should and would have been deleted from any comments section pretty much anywhere. But I suspect the regular LTE folk encounter that much language in the course of any given day and worse. People who were monitoring the posting in real time noted that posts were going up immediately (i.e. with no evidence of real time monitoring and deletion) and did not see this torrent of profanity.

If the Washington Post really has an archive of abusive posts they should produce it in print form for an independent panel to assess. Because frankly I don't believe it.