More comments on our comments feature
In a Q & A on the globeandmail.com website with new editorial-page editor John Geiger and op-ed editor Patrick Martin, there were some questions about the Globe’s comments feature and the strengths (or weaknesses) of that feature. I’ve excerpted the comments here, and globeandmail.com editor Jim Sheppard’s response:
R. Harris: This would be a good time for you to explain how your on-line comment-on-this-article function works. How do you decide what to post and what not to? I don’t mean the rules. We can read those. How many posts do you typically get that are not posted (on a percentage basis). How do you decide when to cut off debate? Some stay for days and others disappear in hours. Thank you.
David Demner, Vancouver: Hi, I’m a pretty devout reader of The Globe and Mail and think the reporting is top notch. I must say, though, that the comments on the website really reflect badly on the newspaper. The usually outstanding reporting by The Globe and Mail is seriously undercut by the useless rants that form the majority of comments that are posted, especially when anything even remotely political is involved. Perhaps if the comments didn’t go through an approval process, we would take them with a grain of salt. But to know that these types of comments were actually approved reflects, I think, quite badly on The Globe. I think that there are really three routes that can be taken — either remove the approval process altogether, or have the approval process be much more critical, or remove comments altogether. I would recommend the second since the first won’t solve your main problem and the third seems a little too draconian.
Not the Alliance: Many times, comments submitted on articles on your website that would seem to conform to the content guidelines do not get approved, while other comments that appear borderline do. Often times, you will see accusations that this is evidence of a “lefty” bias at The Globe. But I assume from personal experience that it affects all commentators. Do the website editors actually read all of the comments, or are some just automatically rejected due to volume constraints, etc.? Also, comments do not seem to be updated on a regular basis and some articles never get updated before disappearing. Is this due to a technological problem? Or is this due to volume and editorial constraints?
Emma Hawthorne, Ottawa: I support and admire Israel. But every time I have suggested in an on-line comment-on-this-article that the Palestinian question must be resolved before there will be peace in the Middle East, my comment is not selected. Why?
Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: We believe the user-comment feature of globeandmail.com adds great value for our readers. The complaints raised above are heard frequently in the comment-on-this-article areas of our site. These issues are debated almost daily by the editorial staff of The Globe’s website. There’s certainly no way to satisfy everyone. We get frequent complaints that we publish too many rants or borderline comments. We also get frequent complaints from people whose postings are not approved by our editors — because they violate our clearly-stated guidelines [which are printed at the beginning of this discussion] — that we are engaged in too much “censorship” of free debate simply by enforcing those guidelines.
Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. We strive constantly to avoid bias or even the appearance of bias when deciding what comments to approve. We are accused by the right of favouring the left. We’re also accused by the left of favouring the right.
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