Former Citizen-Times online director Yenne weighs in on the commentshpere: Does ‘censorious activism’ represent a double standard?

Here’s more on online comments and forum speech from John Yenne, the former digital director at the Asheville Citizen-Times. He was laid off last fall. John tells me this is a modified version of a column that he wrote for the newspaper before he was laid off, a column the newspaper never ran.

Here’s some excellent food for thought when it comes to online commenting:

Shortly after the offensive racial comments by talk radio host Don Imus in 2007, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Commission wrote a piece in the Washington Post that was highly critical – not about shock jocks or racists or hate-mongers, but about “censorious activists” who are so readily offended by idiocy.

In the wake of a storm of protest — including calls for Imus’ firing, station and advertiser boycotts, and demands for new controls on talk radio –former NAACP official Michael Meyers posed this question: “If the censors and pressure groups succeed, what will become of our culture of free speech?”

That question goes to the heart of the debate over online forums at media properties. Some activists scoff at the question, staking claim to high moral ground:

“Mainstream media has a responsibility to raise the level of discourse.”

“You don’t permit un-moderated comments in your printed publication.”

“Words have meaning and should be treated carefully.”

Or, as one executive director of a city arts district in the Midwest put it in a letter to a newspaper publisher not long ago: “Why on earth do you allow it?”

The publisher responded with The Perfect Moment – the 1990 art exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photography that resulted in the prosecution of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center on charges of pandering obscenity.

“Expression is expression in art and in our business,” the publisher replied.

The Web is all about increased conversation rather than increased censorship – it’s about more expression, not less. The commentsphere is filled with innovation and choices – from Topix to Twitter to Disqus to IntenseDebate and others – and the mainstream media is very uncomfortable with most of it.

Filtering “offensive commentary” is much more difficult than profanity, especially when you consider that even profanity filters are easily beaten by the simplest codespeak.

LMFAO.

Make sure you edit that profanity out before you publish this.

What one person screams is “offensive commentary”, another person will call free speech. I sat in a movie theater this weekend with hundreds of people who laughed at the racially charged language of Clint Eastwood’s character in Grand Tarino.I’m pretty sure others were offended by it.
“Censorious activists” argue that people don’t say face-to-face the mean things they say to each other anonymously in Web forums. I agree with Chris Tolles that that people say anonymously on the Web what they are actually thinking and saying to their closest friends.

I had a relative (may she rest in peace) who was an upstanding community citizen but was deeply racist privately. Only her family knew it.

And I believe the Web sheds light on community attitudes like that. Attitudes that are frequently swept under the rug, especially by people who seek to control the conversation for appearance’s sake or ulterior motives.

Insisting on “appropriate” conversation is a comforting, self-righteous approach for people in power. Believe me, over a dozen years in dealing with online conversation, I’ve been personally exposed to the worst manners of self-righteous, wannabe moderators.

And that explains the popularity of Web sites such as dontcensorme.com.

When I was laid off at the Citizen-Times, we were linking to popular Topix forums and hosted another forum through a Gannett social-networking tool called Pluck. We made it easy for users to change the channel if they preferred the tone of one over the other.

On both, we gave users have the ability to flag any post as offensive and those posts were reviewed.

When I left, we were getting upwards of 7,000 forum posts a week, and only about 3% of those were ever flagged as offensive. Much fewer were actually removed for violating terms of service.

So, who is the audience taking part in this online expression? Data shows that it is largely a workday crowd looking for a diversion. Typical newspaper Website users are age 21-59, have a good education, earn a good income, and are evenly split between men and women.

So, who are the “censorious activists,” as the civil rights official calls them?

In absence of hard evidence, they might spring from the research of noted Southern educator and author Ruby Payne, who has studied speech and social class in America. Part of her work reveals how inappropriate speech to one person is legitimate speech to another — and how that can cause serious problems in education, the workplace and communities.

On the other hand, “censorious activism” might simply represent a double standard.

A censorious activist on the left might be the person who revels in the ribald political satire of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart — who tosses F-bombs like candy at a parade – but is deeply offended and demands censure for the vice president when he tosses one on the Senate floor.

A censorious activist on the right might be the FCC under the current administration, which has blessed profanity on network TV when spoken by white soldiers in Saving Private Ryan, but censored the same words in a PBS documentary when spoken by black musicians.

Biblically speaking, this is focusing on the mote in someone else’s eye while not seeing the beam in your own.

The Web has created a communication revolution that is the bane of some professionals, governments, institutions, businesses and sophisticates who prefer communication on their own terms. And there’s no doubt that raw Web chatter can be jarring to experienced newspaper readers who expect prose that is tightly edited for style and substance.

Ironically, experienced Web users view those folks as “newbies” or “flame bait” and an easy target for “trolls.”

Years ago, I sat on a university-backed panel discussion on the limits of free speech and was positioned next to a popular black anchorwoman from the Twin Cities. The emcee launched into the debate about the dangers of hate speech in the media, and the anchorwoman – much like the ex-NAACP official Meyers – stunned him by saying that people should be allowed to speak their minds freely because it frames them in ways that a journalist could never describe.

Her statements seriously deflated the “censorious activists” in the audience hoping to create a moral panic that day.

How about you? How do you respond when the guy in the next cubicle remarks that he’d like to “drop a bomb” on the city council?

Unsophisticated speech? Yes.

Offensive, threatening, hate speech? No.

Unless it fits your agenda.