Posted

Not to beat a dead horse but this has been really bugging me all along. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't, you know, just lying to cover their asses. But it gets really difficult to do. Before the comments were yanked I was reading the Washington Post blog throughout the day. I saw very little that was over the top or obscenity laden. The only way their claims are plausible is if they were extraordinarily quick on the trigger to delete such posts. There were mean posts, yes, but not the kind of sexist profanity-laced invective that Howell and Brady keep claiming. There's been almost no evidence to support those claims. Since then they've been restoring many of the comments, though not all of them, and there's some evidence trail regarding the posts which are just too awful for the world to see.

They just aren't so bad.

The "civility card" has been played ever since I've been watching the media. You know, "yes, well, uh, maybe we were wrong but the REAL STORY IS JUST HOW MEAN OUR CRITICS ARE." This is rich coming from people who regularly deal with Karl "fair game" and "fuck him like he's never been fucked before" Rove. I'm all for civility for people who deserve it but frankly the only way to get a lot of these people to respond is to make a hell of a lot of noise. Making a hell of a lot of noise doesn't require profanity or insults, but it does require, metaphorically, releasing the hounds on them. Get a few thousand critics and a few of them might say something which makes Howell and Brady, who have lived their lives in hermetically sealed tanks up until this point, blush.

I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt but increasingly I just think they're full of shit. In her most recent column Howell claimed:

the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column, e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down.

I'd like to think that in 2006 the person hired to be the ombudsman of a major newspaper understands the difference between a "comment" and an "email." I guess she probably doesn't, but if she really does I'd like to see some of the "flaming emails."

But, basically, I call foul. The Post trashed its readers with multiple news stories in multipe media outlets claiming they were oh so abusive. There's been almost no evidence of that despite many efforts to find it.