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.
emotional editorial | spreading the wealth | call to calm |
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.
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