Opinions

Legislators in New York are tired of all the anonymous jerks out there saying unfathomable things about other people on the Internet. They want something done, and now, about these scurrilous, nameless, feckless, worthless, nasty, scum-sucking bastards. The legislation they’ve put forth to do just that has a central requirement, as follows:

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONYMOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE.

One media analyst out there posited that such a rule would sail through just fine, provided that we repeal the First Amendment. And that’s stating things modestly. Take a look at the sort of transaction that the legislation appears ready to trigger: A Web administrator would have to investigate the identity of a commenter in order to keep the comment on the site. News outlets would quickly face a choice between hiring huge staffs of comment investigators or just shutting down comment sections altogether. Wonder which outcome would prevail.

Didn’t the sponsors of this legislation understand its friction with a free society, or at least a bit of trouble with freedom of expression? Tom O’Mara, the Republican sponsor of the bill in the New York Senate, says he “assumed” there’d be such “concerns.” O’Mara represents towns such as Elmira, Cornell and Ithaca, in the state’s Southern Tier. And boy are the comments in that part of the country ever fierce. Here, for instance, is one from a recent piece in the Elmira Star-Gazette about plans for compressed natural gas offerings at Dandy Mini Marts, a project for which U.S. Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) made an appearance:

Rep. Reed calls for a comprehensive energy policy but doesn’t explain. We can probably guess what he has in mind; he doesn’t mention protecting the environment. Reed refers to 27 bills but doesn’t say what they are. In fact, they are political bills crafted for partisan purposes. Congress will do little this year but play politics. As we have real problems crying out for responsible solutions, we should insist that the parties work together on a bipartisan agenda. Rep. [John A.] Boehner has threatened to rerun his clown act from 18 months ago, possibly doing further damage to America’s credit rating. This isn’t responsible.

The commenter is ID’d by name, via Facebook.

O’Mara says the bill isn’t motivated by personal animus. He has never been slimed too much by Internet trolls — “until I introduced this legislation.” Some impolite e-mails have reached his inbox since the bill started drawing publicity.

As for the First Amendment crisis posed by the bill, O’Mara says, “We have no intention or desire to infringe upon that and realize that we’ve opened up a can of worms with this issue, and so we’ve got a great deal of thinking to do on this issue.”

The idea behind it, he says, is that “if you’re an individual that somebody makes a false claim or accusation against or is harassing . . . the person who’s the target of that would be able to contact the Web site and say this is untrue or call attention to the fact that it’s harassing.”

In what can only be an understatement, O’Mara says there’s a need to “tighten up the language on who is the permissible one to make the inquiry to the Web site — you have to be the victim or the target” of the anonymous slur, he says.

Well, what if someone else falsely claims to be the victim? How would the legislation deal with such a scenario? “That’s a good comment, and we should think of ways to deal with that,” says O’Mara. “It’s all part of the dialogue that I would like to see.”

Whatever your take on the Daily Caller, give them this: They know their audience. Not long after the conservative news site this morning announced a gun giveaway promotion, Publisher and CEO Neil Patel told me that ”thousands” of people had entered themselves as contestants. By 2:30 p.m., the site had recorded more than 6,000 entries.

That means that the Daily Caller has a bunch more e-mail addresses in its system. The site sells e-mail blasts to parties that want to reach its audience. (It doesn’t sell the database itself). Last November, for instance, it sent out a mass e-mail with the subject line: “Newt Gingrich Drawing Standing Ovations and Surging In Polls.”

The e-mail carried an important disclaimer, right at the top, indicating that the message was from “one of our advertisers, Newt 2012” and that it doesn’t “necessarily” represent “the opinion or editorial positions of The Daily Caller.” Fair enough.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, right, with former ambassador Walt Cutler this month at Cafe Milano. (Rebecca D'Angelo - for the Washington Post) Last week, the Erik Wemple blog had a couple of posts on evidence that Washington Times and United Press International columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave had borrowed from stories previously published on the Internet. Those pieces were bundled into a news story that ran in the Style section of Tuesday’s print edition of The Post.

The Washington Post’s ombudsman passed along the following complaint from a reader* regarding that story:

The media news coming out of New Orleans is confirmed. The Times-Picayune is moving from a daily newspaper to a three-times-per-week publication — Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Those days, says the paper’s management, “have proved to be the most valuable days for the newspaper’s advertisers.”

In case you missed it---Washington Times scrubs some recent columns by Arnaud de Borchgrave from the paper’s Web site . Is that a good move, considering that the paper had announced it was investigating the columnist’s work? Or is that a shadowy and untransparent move?

Also: Just what motivated Fairleigh Dickinson University to do a bigger version of its November 2011 poll that essentially blasted Fox News?

Elsewhere:

*No! The New York Times’ David Carr is reporting on some drastic news relating to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Sources are indicating that the paper may bag its daily publishing schedule and move to two or three times per week. Staff cuts are also in the offing, according to Carr.

*This is one that strains every notion of credulity, to the point that I’d like to put it in the category of hoax. Wired.com writes that there’s a crusade afoot in the state of New York against anonymous writings on the Internet. The legislation says:

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONYMOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME, AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE.

Wired says that the measure hasn’t the slightest hope of weathering a constitutional challenge “unless the First Amendment is repealed.”

*Politico’s Dylan Byers takes after Rachel Maddow over talking points on unemployment.

*La Nación, an Argentine newspaper, is wading into database investigations, and loving it.

La Nación DATA comprises 10 people; six from the tech side (a project manager, a trainer, two designers, two IT folks), and four full-time data journalists. It is a small team but the data movement is thriving in the newsroom. Two weeks ago, La Nación created a data producer position to spot and convert useful data that comes in via press releases, emails, or PDFs. There are 8 data producers in different sections of the newsroom, and the plan is to keep adding more.

*Magazine publishers’ comment about the Internet: Meh.

*More on the White House and key federal agencies giving some nice access to filmmakers who were researching the ins and outs of the successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. The Daily Beast writes that the “two people who appear to have gotten the best access last year to this often-classified side of government were Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning pair who wrote and directed The Hurt Locker.”

The Beast quotes Lucy Dalglish, executive director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, as calling the whole thing “outrageous.” “If these filmmakers got access that trained national security and military reporters did not, then it’s telling the public: ‘We are not going to allow trained journalists to tell this story. If you want to know what happened, go buy a ticket to a movie,’” Dalglish said.

*The Los Angeles Times issues advice to the common individual on how to regard polling data. With caution, that is.

*How did Piers Morgan react to the claim made at Leveson inquiry that he instructed a peer on how to hack phones?

*Go to the 6:00 mark of the video below for a great, sustained frenzy of cable news crosstalk, courtesy of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.”