There are MORE deleted comments from WaPo blog (Jan 15-18)! See them here!

[StefanX]

As many of you know, the Washington Post caused an uproar this week when their ombudsman Deobrah Howell lied about the Abramoff scandal, falsely claiming that Abramoff had given money to Democrats -- and then WaPo added fuel to the fire by deleting hundreds of reader comments on the WaPo blog complaining about the ombudsman's lying.

The DU archive of the deleted WaPo blog comments here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/archive/2006/wapo/

includes comments posted on Jan 19. However, readers had begun posting comments on WaPo's blog as early as Jan 15, and these earlier deleted comments do not appear to be included in DU's archive of the blog.

But have no fear -- there are two ADDITIONAL archives of the WaPo blog out there, archiving comments from Jan 15 - 18!

You can check them out at these two links (the first one is a blog I created after snapshotting the original WaPo blog page by hitting CTRL-S; and the second one is a Yahoo cache):

Deleted comments posted Sunday Jan 15, 2006 5:26:13 - Mon Jan 16 8:45:51 PM:
http://wapolies.blogspot.com/

Deleted comments posted Jan 17, 2006 1:25:42 AM - Jan 18, 2006 3:21:44 PM:
Yahoo Cache

The overwhelming majority of the comments, although naturally quite negative and vehement about WaPo's lying, were thoughtfully written, with many of them raising important points about accountability, transparency, journalistic ethics, and the current crisis in the "mainstream" media.

WaPo tried to justify deleting the comments by falsely claiming that there were many obscene or profane comments. However, this was not the case -- unless two or three isolated outbursts such as "bullshit" and "stfu" now qualify as "obscene".

Enjoy! And maybe now WaPo will learn the old saying: "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."

Remember, anybody can save a copy of an entire web-page to their hard drive simply by doing 'File' > 'Save' (or by hitting CTRL-S). And then if you want to re-publish it, there are many free publishing services such as blogger.com out there where it takes only a few minutes to set up a new blog.

[Hissyspit]

1. Thanks. And so what if there were obscene or profane comments?

Why not just delete THOSE? (Not that they should do that, either.) Clearly WaPo got caught in their hypocrisy and are protecting their self-interest and not journalistic and public interest.