Afternoon Reading List 06.25.12.

WaPo Dana Milbank's "selective outrage"? Over the weekend Carl Wicklander, a registered Republican and regularly contributor to Humblelibertarian.com, published a piece on the Independent Voter Network website after reading a recent Milbank column in his paper, the St. Louis Dispatch, in which Milbank compares The Daily Caller's Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson to a Montana outhouse. Some things we like about the site: Each article gives you an estimated minute count of how long it should take you to reach the story. For example, this story should take you 3-5 minutes to read. Key graph: "Disagreeable attitudes directed at an incumbent from the opposition party is nothing new and Milbank is either naive or disingenuous to insinuate that it is an innovation derived from today’s political culture. Perhaps he has never heard of Thomas Jefferson, whose scribe James Callender likened the sitting president John Adams to a hermaphrodite. It’s no outhouse in Montana, but negative politics is slightly older than the Internet Age." Conclusion: "For a man like Milbank he may want to strip a little of the veneer from the presidency and consider whether the people in his place, the media, have substituted the dignity of the office for responsible journalism." Newspaper commenters form lonely hearts club -- The Akron Beacon Journal published a lengthy story over the weekend on a yearlong project regarding civility called the Ohio Civility Project. In it, they examine public comment sections and interviewed some of the anonymous commenters to question them on what they write or rant as the case may be. One commenter speaks to loneliness as a reason for the abundance of online nastiness. “There are a lot of wounded souls that like to post because they are really lonely,” he said. “They like to lash out and know that somebody really cares about them.” Funniest line: When the paper first published a curtain raiser about the civility project, a reader wrote, “Civility? Great idea. Butt crack. Poo. Flatulate.” Read the full story here.

Fishbowl

Afternoon Reading List 06.25.12.

Betsy Rothstein

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Betsy Rothstein