Comments And An Open Thread
Yesterday I deleted a comment that was off topic, and the commenter -- a long-time and valued member of the CQ community -- objected to the decision. He thought that I should have covered a different topic and took it upon himself to open a thread on the matter, within an existing thread on satellite radio, and then objected to my calling it a "hijack". However, that is precisely the term used when commenters attempt to inject a completely unrelated topic on an existing thread, and my policy has been to delete comments that do that.
As to my editorial decisions on covering events, I plead guilty to posting on topics that interest me. I post a number of threads a day, and I write about those topics that generate a response in me. It takes hours each day to produce the output here at CQ, and I love doing it -- but I'm not going to try to cover every single news thread. I'm also not going to apologize for missing a story out of the several I publicize here every day. If I've missed something, that's an opportunity for someone else to blog about it.
The topic that I was faulted for not addressing was the Walter Reed story, which took some bad experiences by a few of our soldiers and turned it into an indictment of the entire facility. I can tell you from extensive personal experience with hospitals over the last 13 years that anyone can find a dozen or so people who believe that a particular hospital is the worst example of medical care. On occasion, I'm one of those people with the medical facilities we use. I'm not all that interested in anecdotal reporting, and on that day, I had other topics that interested me.
On the other hand, I never offer open threads, preferring a structured debate on issues. Maybe that's a little too structured, so consider this an open thread -- any topic that interests you, post it here. Let's see how the debate develops.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 20, 2007 7:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
