In the midst of my terribly uninteresting brief feud with James T. Harris last week (my twin conclusions: he’s not really beholden to traditional concepts like “making sense” or “accuracy”; also while he says having me on his show doesn’t “interest” him, he’s probably just not that into viewpoints dissimilar to his own), I heard a few of his supporters claim that they thought about writing in to defend Harris’ honor, but they knew that we wouldn’t run anything on it. On a related note, there was a comment left on our site last week from someone asking what happened to the Mailbag feature.
I think anyone who has seen Mailbag in the past, even recently during my time as the editor, realizes that the Weekly isn’t afraid to run contrary opinions. After the Isaiah Toothtaker cover story, we ran a letter criticizing us for “lauding such (an) undeserving, vicious criminal.” We ran a letter calling my decision to drop film times “BONEHEADED.” Honestly, I’d rather run negative comments than positive ones. They’re usually more interesting and often include fascinating uses of capital letters.
The reason we haven’t run Mailbag in awhile is more a problem of not getting that many letters to the editor to begin with lately. I think I received one this week (that’s not exactly true, now that I think about it … I can always count on getting five or six out-of-state emails from people championing the Fair Tax), but generally, emails in actual letter form are so sporadic that I can’t really count on them enough to leave space in the paper to run them. In some ways, I think that’s just an evolution of how people interact with publications like ours. Why bother sending an email, when you can just jump in our comment section and fire away a response? Personally, while I try to respond to every email I get about the paper, I’d almost rather people go the comment route, partially because someone else might have the same concern or comment and see the dialogue that (hopefully) ensues. And unless you break one of our commenting rules (none of which preclude saying negative things about the Weekly or our writers as long as you keep it relatively decent), you’re welcome to tell me what a gift a local radio host is to our city.
This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2013.
Alrighty then, thanks for letting us know, Editor. (I am the “Someone” who left the comment about the letters to the editor, BTW.)
And since Starnet is curtailing anonymous comments, it will be interesting to see what happens here.
The Arizona Republic banned anonymous comments about a year ago, and the number went from hundreds to about five per article. Most of them now are touting get-rich-quick schemes, or the author can’t decide if they agree or disagree with the article. Bottom line is, we learn virtually nothing from the comments. They also replaced the thumbs up/down with only the nauseating ‘like’; you’ll find this hard to believe, but readers only like comments now. I can learn from comments I disagree with, as well as from those I agree with.
You can still comment anonymously-just create a fake name Facebook page. All you need is an email address and those are easy to come by. While most of the Republic’s comments are not anonymous some are.
Oh for God’s sake. Unless your standing in front of a person with their ID stuck out it’s ALL ANONYMOUS. Changing your name from Anonymous to Camel Toe Joe does not shine any light on your identity.
As for Harris. He’s stone cold stuck on himself so there’s no point in trying to reach him. Around all that giggling, he’s pretty angry. Sawed off shotgun, hand on the pump.