The digital TV revolution raises some interesting issues, including some you may not have thought of. Which is why I brought them up this week on the radio.
KCUR - Digital TV Pt. 1 - 5/27/2008
KCUR - Digital TV Pt. 2 - 5/27/2008
As you may have noticed, I have decided once again to accept comments ... but this time I've turned moderation on. I don't think I've moderated comments before, but I realized that soliciting emails just wasn't going to produce the kind of feedback that comments used to. It was something Bob Costas said to me during the whole Buzz Bissinger thing that got me thinking about doing moderated comments. He said that even talk radio hosts have their calls screened, which of course was not news to me, but it was the way he said it that got me thinking.
"If you truly didn't have a bleep button in talk radio," said Costas, "you wouldn't just have the occasional person spewing scurrilous things, you'd have it all the time, more and more ... to the point where it crowded out other voices and brought the whole enterprise down."
So I thought, What if I just removed the posts I personally found obnoxious? How bad would that be? The Keith Olbermann post became an excellent test case. I zapped a handful of comments — including one from a person I know and like — because they served no purpose other than to ventilate in a way you never would in public (except maybe at a rugby bar). Also, I have to say I took great pleasure deleting one comment from some jackass who testily corrected my use of the word "accrued" in the obituary I wrote for Bob. I'd hate to be that guy's stepkid.
What I'm aiming for, through my totally arbitrary pruning efforts, is some freewheeling give-and-take that people can actually read. Not that I'm comparing my blog to the Huffington Post, but does anyone actually read the comments over there? They get thousands, but as a fellow critic noted in an email to me this week, "They just fling crap at each other." I thought that was a hilarious image, and wrote back, "I wonder if the monkeys can control that with their minds?" And my friend replied, "Those robot arms can fling crap a MILE."
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