As someone who’s been saying for over seven years that you should “read the newspaper upside down,” — that newspapers’ online comment sections are “the place you get the real story,” — I’ve been unsurprised that so many of them are getting shut down.
What I didn’t expect was that Damian Thompson would be cheering this development.
I thought this odd, having enjoyed his writing and always figured him for one of us “free speech,” Up the Proles types.
Alas and alack…
Anyhow, The Z Man read his post too:
This is modern journalism in a nutshell. You have the fishbowl of semi-retarded people hired to do a job a high school boys used to do. Now, instead of high school grads, journalism employs middle-aged men with advanced degrees in nonsense specialties like sociology. Damian Thompson has a Ph.D in the sociology of religion, which is about as useful as a masters degree in sitting still. But, you can be sure he has killed many hours boring his colleagues with tales of his days at university.
The reason news sites are killing off comment sections is two-fold. One, it is usually where you get the bits of the news story our betters edited out in order to maintain the narrative. The “Minnesota man” in the story is identified in the comments as Jorge Gonzalez, an illegal from Guadalajara. It’s where the “suspect wearing a red shirt” is identified as a black guy named T’Q’ull Ferguson with a Facebook page full of pics of him holding a handgun and a bong. The comment sections have become a leak in the system.
