An Online Forum on Fire

After the Orange County Register reported on April Branum (a mom who found out she was pregnant two days before giving birth) March 2, almost 200 people posted comments on the Register's online forum. Comments ranged from stating that Branum was "grossly obese" to saying that she "can't even take care of herself."

Branum ignored the comments. However, her fiancée (who is also the father of the baby) called the Register to complain. The paper's online deputy editor essentially said that filtering comments to make sure nothing posted is "hurtful" would defeat the purpose of the paper's online forum (to allow people to post without fear of being censored).

Currently, the basic rules at the newspaper's site are to not post anything that is vulgar, obscene, a racial slur, threatening, illegal, hostile or insulting. In addition, it takes three people's objections of "abuse" to finally have a comment taken down.

There is nothing wrong with a paper having an online place to post comments. It generates feedback, lets a paper know what people are interested in reading about and also promotes thinking.

What is bad about this particular incident on the part of the newspaper is a question of whether the story was news to begin with. Someone giving birth and not realizing she is pregnant until two days before giving birth: is that really news? Or, did the paper print the story and run it online to garner a reaction because this woman was overweight (and seeing as how people place a stigma on overweight people, it was an obvious attention-getter)?

There are many stories of teens who do not realize they are pregnant until they give birth and no one reports on them, why should Branum's story be any different. One has to wonder about the motives of the paper when stories like this are printed.

The Register does a good job of reporting local news. However, was this really something that was worthy of a story or just something to draw in more readers?

Incidentally, isn't posting that someone is "grossly obese" or "disgusting" considered an insult, which is against the Register's rules of online posting? Why wasn't that being monitored and taken down at the first sign of the comment being posted?

Why did it take a call from Branum's fiancée to have any possible alarms being raised that perhaps the Register was wrong in even reporting on the story and also failing in more closely monitoring the comments.

There's a lot of negativity being posted on web sites. That certainly doesn't give a newspaper the right to be lazy in being vigilant about the trash talk posted on its comment boards just because it is the name of free speech and promoting a "discussion." Insults should not be considered an argument to any rational discussion promoting thought.