Dear Baltimore Sun, Re: Commenters.

Dear Baltimore Sun,

You should really moderate the comments on your website.  They are threatening, poorly written, evenly more poorly reasoned, often racist and usually unrelated to the article they’re attached to.  I understand their purpose: to give people a chance to respond and start a conversation.  This is a good purpose.  This is the best part of this Web 2.0 stuff.  And if you moderated them and kept out the irrelevant, threatening, racist ones, this might happen.

But as it stands:

1) You’re paying for webspace and bandwidth for idiots to pontificate and then never come back, which is hardly a conversation.  You’re paying for people to generalize about black people, to attack politicians in stupid ways, etc.  You’re a newspaper!  You’re supposed to edit what you publish!
2) People leave blatantly threatening comments; other people report them (multiple times); you never do anything about it. I assume you have a certain level of editorial integrity, yes? Why publish comments by people who can barely type legible sentences when all that clearly comes across is hate/racism/assholery?
3) There are people like me who refuse to read your website and paper because you seem to endorse this kind of behavior.  There are other sources to read the same stories sans mean comments at the end about the kid who got assaulted by a cop, the man killed by an irresponsible truck driver, etc.
4) You lose money.
5) You lose readers and don’t get the news out.
6) 4 and/or 5 mean(s) that your purpose fails.
7) You’re contributing to the climate of idiocy that seems to sweep over Maryland whenever the state’s Republicans don’t get their way in elections.

Please don’t tell me about your belief in Freedom of Speech. Print the F word tomorrow morning if that’s what you’re about. Right there on the front page. And address it to JOHNNY so I know it’s for me. This has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech.  It requires accountability, and there is none.

This is really and actually because you either:

1) Think this bullshit is Okay, in which case, I hope your paper fails, personally.
2) You don’t care what people write on your site, in which case, you should hire some bloggers (like me!) to run it for you.
3) You don’t pay any attention at all to what goes up on your own website. That’s just irresponsible to a terrible degree and doesn’t lend you much in the way of credibility and really means your paper should fail.

I look forward to some integrity and discretion from you in the future. And, seriously, thanks for being the only official news outlet to show up for the Ghost Bike last month (and I’m not being sarcastic; no stations came at all, only you).

Thank you,

This Dude