The Western News will no longer support online comments
From the Editor:
Many of our online readers noticed a change in our digital format earlier this week, when the reader comments section was removed from our website.
The decision to remove the comments section was one made with a great deal of discussion between the local team at The Western News and our management team in Kalispell. It was not a decision made lightly, but one we all agreed was in the best interests of the newspaper, our subscribers and our community as a whole.
We research issues, attend community events and write news for one purpose: to keep our community informed. In doing so, we hope to engage the people of our community in discussions about the topics that matter most to them. From time to time, those discussions will become heated and emotional. That is unavoidable, as we all have different backgrounds, beliefs and ideas.
What has happened of late, however, is that the discussions on our comment forums have devolved far beyond rational, respectful discourse. The disagreements have moved from debates about issues and ideas to personal attacks on individuals and, in doing so, has left The Western News in a gray area of law and precedent.
At the root of the issue is responsibility. At what level is The Western News, as owner of the website, responsible for the content posted by the public?
If an individual posts slanderous or libelous remarks on our site do we share the liability for said comments as if we’d printed them in the newspaper?
More importantly, as members of this community, are we in good conscience willing to allow such things to happen on our website?
We were advised that comment moderation on the website should be “all or nothing,” meaning we either keep a very close eye on everything or we don’t monitor or moderate the comments at all. By moderating some comments, we were told, we accept a legal responsibility for all of the content.
We don’t have the personnel or the resources to continually monitor the comments posted on our website to ensure propriety and compliance with policy. Given that, our options were to either allow the comment forums to turn into a free-for-all or to shut them down entirely.
We made the decision to shut them down.
As both a business and as individual members of this community, we cannot in good conscience allow our forums to go unmoderated as there have been too many recent examples of wholly inappropriate posts. While we could avoid legal liability through a disclaimer, it would not absolve us of our ethical obligations on a personal level.
The Western News remains fully committed to our mission of providing relevant, accurate information to our readers and to being part of the ongoing discussion about the future of our community, our state, our nation and our world. We will do that the old-fashioned way – through our opinion page. We encourage readers to send in their letters to the editor, which we will continue to publish in accordance with our established editorial policies.
Bob Henline is editor of The Western News