On comments on news sites

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Jan. 12, 2009, 1:06 p.m.

On Friday, I sat in on the panel of commentators on Beat the Press, the weekly media-criticism show on Boston’s public television station WGBH. One of the topics: comments on news sites, and how news organizations should deal with troublesome commenters. Here’s eight minutes of our discussion, featuring Dan Kennedy, Joe Sciacca, and my colleague Callie Crossley.

One quick note. Joe, at about 4:20, shares an unfortunate conventional wisdom among media lawyers: that a news organization’s moderation of comments opens it up to massive legal liability. That conventional wisdom is, in all but a few very uncommon cases, false. More on that on Wednesday.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Jan. 12, 2009, 1:06 p.m.

Show tags

TWITTER FACEBOOK EMAIL

Joshua Benton

That time Rupert Murdoch endorsed Jimmy Carter (no, really)

It was the first time many Americans saw Rupert Murdoch using his news outlets to advance his interests — and a lesson in how a media mogul’s outside financial ties can taint the editorial product.

Neel Dhanesha

GBH tried to sell the home of a legendary radio station. It kicked off a proxy war for the soul of audio.

“Woods Hole tends to be pretty passionate about things, and when people get startled they get angry.”

Alexios Mantzarlis

Let’s fact-check Mark Zuckerberg’s fact-checking announcement

Zuckerberg didn’t mention that a big chunk of the content fact-checkers have been flagging is not political speech, but the low-quality spammy clickbait that Meta platforms have commodified.