Post Editor Brady Wants an End to Internet Anonymity by ohmproject [Subscribe]
Tue May 06, 2008 at 08:12:08 AM PDT
Washington Post editor Jim Brady wants to put an end to the "back alley environment" on the Internet. His feelings and those of some of his subordinates (in particular, Deborah Howell), have been injured in the past by comments that Brady felt were the kind of thing you'd find "carved on the wall of a public toilet stall."
The solution, Brady says, is to end Internet anonymity.
"People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table.
Brady has tried various solutions to maintain control of the comment threads at the Post. He's erased comments, closed accounts and banned IPs, but none of those methods was completely satisfactory.
Brady's solution? Adopt South Korea's "real-name Internet " policy and require positive ID before allowing people to comment online.
I don't know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver's license or passport, but I think making people responsible would raise the level of discourse.
Mr. Brady's email address, just in case you're interested is:
executive.editor@washingtonpost.com
If you drop him a friendly line, you might remind him of a few anonymous publications of the past whose authors were later revealed:
"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine
"The Federalist Papers" by Hamilton, Madison and Jay
"A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency" by Benjamin Franklin
Paine put it this way when confronting the issue of publishing anonymously:
Who the author of this publication is, is totally unecessary to the public itself, as the object of attention is the docrine itself, not the man. Yet it may not be unecessary to say, that he unconnected with any party,and under no sort of influence public or private, but the influence of reason and principle.