To all those individuals who would like to leave comments at the Commercial Appeal concerning their invasion of private, law-abiding citizens’ privacy by publishing a database of handgun carry permit holders, and especially at their most recent editorial rationalizing their actions, I offer this warning:
After you leave your comment, please log out and verify it existence, especially after a day or two.
I left a comment yesterday, shortly after noon, and have remained logged in at that site ever since. What I could see while I was logged in to my commenting account is shown below:
The comment was still there, and I confess to some small surprise at this.
However, after some prompting from Name Witheld (sic), I logged out of my commenting account at the Commercial Appeal to check on the status of my comment. What I observed is below:
As you can clearly see, my comment vanished. Unfortunately, given the dim view this newspaper and its staff has concerning individual rights, this did not really surprise me.
What did floor me is that, after logging back in to repost the comment, I could still see it in the comment thread. Logged out – comment gone. Logged in – comment still there. I admit that I logged in and out repeatedly to verify this, but it held true every single time I logged in or out.
“Reasoned Discourse” is one thing, and unfortunately to be expected in cases such as these, especially from supposed champions of the First Amendment and the people’s specious “right to know”. But duplicitous “reasoned discourse”…? That is a whole new level of loathsome.
Update: And a hearty “Welcome!” to my readers from Instapundit. Feel free to take a gander at my most recent fisk of the Commercial Appeal’s editorials, my reciprocal listing of the contact information for the staff at the Commercial Appeal, or the contact information for the Commercial Appeal’s advertisers, if you want to let them know of your displeasure over how the money they are giving the Commercial Appeal is being misused to victimize law-abiding citizens. Or feel free to poke around anywhere else – I tend not to bite, at least not too hard.
related posts:
emotional editorial | call to calm | spreading the wealth |
Many commercial sites like newspapers, et,al, have the ability to “moderate” comments so that they appear to be there to the author, but no one else can see them. Like you I consider this practice to be un-ethical, but there appears nothing we can do about it except let other people know. If a site is not going to allow your comment to stay, they should at least have the balls to let you know.
commercial fisking
*headdesk* It seems as though the Commercial Appeal (and, more specifically, its editor – Chris Peck) cannot stop putting up half-assed rationalizations for their handgun carry permit holder database. Once more into the fisking breach I go. Misundersta…
Exactly. I cannot say as though I am terribly surprised, given me experiences with this newspaper, but I really expected a bit stronger ethics out of these folks, considering how they are champions of the “people’s right to know”… or somesuch nonsense like that.
Cancel your subscription to the paper and encourage all your friends to do likewise. When you call, tell the person who answers the phone your reason for the cancellation. Wish them luck in their new job, if they can find one.
Well, at least now the whole world knows what small people they are thanks to Glenn at http://www.instapundit.com
I’ve cross posted over at a couple of well known gun sites.
You can’t pimp your website at other sites. It’s considered spamming, even if it’s good stuff.
Dude. Nobody needs to spam Glenn’s site. It is, in fact, the other way around. By a few million hits a day, that is.
BTW, I’m not Glenn.
Peck and crew have no standard except self preservation
Yes, it’s usually considered spamming but in this case appropriate considering the length. One thing he could do to reduce the spam claim on the unposts would be linking to a ‘print ready’ page sans links, logos or ads. Also, were I the paper, I wouldn’t want to promote this guy’s site after giving him exclusive rights to print the material.
One of the sites that Say Uncle had linked to on this topic has posted the mailing address of many of the top executives at the paper.
Write them physical letters.
Apologies, all, for the delay in responding to your comments – I was not expecting an Instalanche today (or, really, any day), and the whole “work” thing got in my way. That said, thank you for stopping by, leaving your comments, and letting me know how you feel about / view the situation. I certainly would not mind if you spread the word of this incident, either, either by linking back to my group of posts on it, or by writing up your own – any exposure of the privacy-invasion committed by the Commercial Appeal would be appreciated.
Trust me, vigilant, if I had a subscription, I would most certainly cancel it. As it is now, I strongly urge anyone who does have a subscription, and an interest in their own privacy and rights, to do exactly what you suggested. Furthermore, I would prompt people to contact the companies who advertise at the Commercial Appeal, and inform them that you will no longer be availing yourself of their products or services until they either take down their advertisements, or the Commercial Appeal takes down its database.
So, benintn, what would have been the better course? Do you think that the folks at the Commercial Appeal would have appreciated me posting a 2000+ word fisking of their article in their comments section? Furthermore, none of the other newspaper-related sites I have posted at seemed to mind me linking back to my site in response to some of their articles, and certainly none of the weblogs I frequent mind it either. When the site one is linking to is not only topical, but also directly in response to the original post, how can it be spam?
And, in reality, the deletion does not really bother me that much – after all, it is the Commercial Appeal’s site, and its staff is more than welcome to monitor, control, and clean out comments left at the site, for whatever reason or compulsion it so desires. Granted, in the case of a newspaper, suppression of feedback is somewhat ironic, but that is neither here nor there. My problem was with the subterfuge involved, in that I had no idea my comments were deleted until I took the time to log out and verify their existence – if you are going to delete my comments, at least have the nerve to inform me, even if it is an impartial computerized notification, or nothing more than the simple absence of the comment from my logged-in view.
Thanks for the repost, Letalis. I certainly was not expecting an Instalanche, but it will most certainly help get the word out concerning the duplicitous nature of the Commercial Appeal. And, like I said, I think benintn was referring to me posting links back to my site at the Commercial Appeal, rather than me trying to spam Glenn.
The somewhat ironic thing, Gary, is that I am relatively certain this database will more negatively influence the Commercial Appeal’s reader numbers than positively influence them. That is, of course, speculation on my part, but the comments that are allowed to remain indicate an overwhelming disagreement with what the staff at that newspaper has done.
Good call on creating a link/advertisement-free page, Rob S, and if I really cared about the links or the exposure, I might do that. On the flip side, those advertisements have never generated me much money, and the links are necessary for substantiation of my comments. Additionally, the newspaper’s staff is being inconsistent as to which offsite links they are allowing to remain in the comments. Oddly enough, comments that include links, but are anti-guns, anti-rights, and/or pro-Commercial-Appeal are being allowed to remain. As it is, none of the comments I left at the Commercial Appeal are still seeing the light of day, whether those comments included links or not. In fact, in more-recent instances, my comments were not even posted before being deleted – they simply never existed at all. Something tells me the commenting privileges of my account at that newspaper have been… suspended. Surprise, surprise.
I put up that same information a few posts earlier too, _Jon, but I am not quite sure about sending them letters to their home addresses quite yet. Showing them what it feels like to have that information published for the whole world to see, though, that is something I can definitely agree with.
And, finally, I would like to suggest that all concerned residents of Tennessee contact their local representatives and request their support on either HB0221 or SB0172 – they are identical bills in the Tennessee House and Senate that would make this kind of disclosure of Tennessee’s handgun carry permit holder database a Class A fine-only misdemeanor.
once more into the breach (again)
Crap on a crutch… the staff of the Commercial Appeal just cannot keep their mouths shut: Martino Johnson, charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Terrelle Beasley this week after a minor traffic accident, held a Tennessee-issued pe…
grain of salt
Since the staff of the Commercial Appeal banned my commenting account there without warning, justification, or notification (this paper is as much a champion of the First Amendment as it is the Second – in a word, “not”), I have…
proliferation
I find it somewhat ironic that the shortest month of the year is also my most prolific, and that it received the highest amount of traffic, ever, for my website. I guess I should thank the staff of the Commercial…
commercial appeal compilation
(I tried to make an independent, non-dated “page” containing this information, but I seem to have broken that aspect of my weblogging engine. I will strive to keep this page updated as best I can, so feel free to refer…
calling in backup
I suppose I should be thankful, in some manner, that the most-recent article from the Commercial Appeal concerning their privacy-invading database of handgun carry permit holders is an actual news story, rather than just another editorial. Granted, it …