What Bill O'Reilly's Feud with the Daily Kos Means for Website Owners

The conflict between old and new media is heating up, and no where is that more evident than in the recent war of words between Fox News Network's Bill O'Reilly and bloggers at the Daily Kos. O'Reilly is a conservative pundit on a highly rated cable network. The Daily Kos is a popular Democratic partisan blog which features a handful of front-page columnists, and allows users to post their own sentiments in individual articles and comments.

So what sparked the David and Goliath confrontation between the two? It all started over some nasty comments left on Daily Kos threads about White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's ailing health.

When the world learned that Tony Snow was battling cancer, the vast majority of posts on the Daily Kos set aside partisanship to wish the man a speedy recovery. However, as most web site owners know, when viewers are allowed to comment freely, contrary opinions are bound to crop up. In the case of Tony Snow, some did not wish him well.

The response to these comments by O'Reilly and other old media pundits was vehement. O'Reilly called the Daily Kos a "hate" site, and compared the community to the Nazis. But it didn't just end in name calling. O'Reilly confronted sponsors of the site for supporting "hate speech," which has already resulted in at least one commercial pull out.

Set aside Godwin's Law for the moment, and the obviously offensive hyperbole involved in comparing people who murdered millions, to a bunch of Internet geeks who type on their laptops in pajamas. The feud between O'Reilly and the Daily Kos should be unsettling to web site owners, regardless of political cast or creed. Whether one views the political advocacy of the Daily Kos with disdain or whether one thinks that Bill O'Reilly's television persona is a case study in narcissism should not matter to web site owners as much as the potential consequences if old media is able to saddle owners with responsibility for the comments of all their users.

As a web site owner, the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas Zúniga conducts minimal oversight when it comes to the hundreds of thousands of comments generated every day. O'Reilly is right to point out that the Daily Kos is not a completely open forum--posters have been banned in the past--but posting on the Daily Kos is largely a free-for-all. It is, in fact, the Daily Kos' hands-off approach when it comes to web site moderation that sometimes tempers the more controversial posts that appear on that blog.

As web site owners know, the free exchange of ideas is a two-edged sword. Just as a post wishing Tony Snow good health might result in comments to the contrary, a negative post often results in user condemnation. It's not unusual to see hundreds of users speak out against front page authors on the Daily Kos, without facing censure. That is to say, even when front page posters, including Markos himself, have made controversial remarks, they have been called out by users of the site, without consequence. The result is a chaotic but open forum in which discourse enjoys minimal interruption.

It might not seem so unusual for a representative of old media to try to object to this, were it not for the fact that O'Reilly hosts Internet forums of his own. O'Reilly denies that he allows any speech on his web site with which he does not agree, but recently, one of his web site users suggested burning down the Capitol Building. Worse, the person was not just a random commenter or a plant, but Jack Kinkaid, a long-time supporter and someone whose opinions O'Reilly regularly features on air.

Perhaps the feud between O'Reilly and the Daily Kos is all theater. Certainly, recent posts on that partisan blog indicate that they are receiving increased attention and that they're not afraid to be "thrown into that briar patch." But the implications for web site owners could be real. If web site owners are forced to own the opinions that pass through their forums, it could cost them in real dollars. In the case of the Daily Kos, it cost them corporate sponsorship. But smaller web site owners may not have the resources to hire people to monitor all content, and may actually incur more legal liability if they try.

So whether web site owners come from the left or the right, this feud could be a problem that knows no political bounds.