Rhetorical Analysis

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April 26, 2009

THE MEDIUM

Comment Is King By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Anne Applebaum is an American political journalist living in Poland whose columns appear weekly in The

Washington Post and on Slate. Her views are pro-free-trade and generally hawkish. A Thatcherite in the

1980s, and a supporter of Obama for president in 2008, Applebaum is stoutly pro-immigration, pro-

intellectual and anti-torture. Last year Foreign Policy magazine declared her one of “the world’s most

sophisticated thinkers.” In awarding the 2004 prize for general nonfiction to her book “Gulag: A History,”

the Pulitzer committee called it a “landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to

the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.”

But what does the analog world know? Online, readers see Applebaum and her work quite differently. To

read The Washington Post’s comments section is to discover an outraged throng that insists she knows

absolutely nothing. Not long ago, a poster named jbburrows pronounced Applebaum a “liberal fool.”

Respondus described her as “a lapsed neo-con addict.” Lloyd667 on Slate wrote, “Anne gets just about

everything wrong.”

Just about everything. You don’t say. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the commentary on Applebaum’s column —

freely accessible on the Washington Post site — runs according to its own uncertain logic. Themes persist

nonetheless. One is that the columnist, whatever her topic, is a “Zionist stooge liar” (in a commenter’s

recent phrase). And while some readers applaud her approach to foreign policy, she is also subjected to

anti-Semitic tirades when she’s not being acidly patronized.

Like no male columnist at The Post, Applebaum is regularly called “sweetie” and “dear” by commenters

who disagree with her. At least one commenter worries that Applebaum’s mother must be disappointed in

her for wasting her education; others slight her for being married to the Polish minister of foreign affairs;

still others insist she should lose her job.

What commenters don’t do is provide a sustained or inventive analysis of Applebaum’s work. In fact, critics

hardly seem to connect one column to the next. In spite of Applebaum’s hard-to-miss hints that she

celebrates Christian holidays (“On Christmas morning, my husband found a CD of ‘The Greatest Speeches

of All Time’ in his stocking”), conspiracy-minded commenters insist that she’s Jewish and that her

Jewishness determines her politics. And even though she makes it plain that her worldview coalesced when

she was reporting on Eastern Europe in the ’80s and ’90s, commenters almost never address the

intellectual consequences of her analogies between the cold war and the war on terror.

Someone should be paying more attention, especially since online newspaper commenters as a whole seem

to have (at least) the stamina, drive and spare time to become a cogent part of online journalism. But as it

is, online commentary is a bête noire for journalists and readers alike. Most journalists hate to read it,

because it’s stinging and distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections unless they

intend to post something themselves. But perhaps the comments have become so reader-unfriendly, in

part, because of the conventions of the Web-comment form.

Online commentary, for one thing, is a circadian art, one in which style and tone seem largely determined

by the time of day a comment is posted. At washingtonpost.com, Applebaum’s columns typically receive

around 100 or 200 responses before the site closes off the commenting option. (At Slate, which is online-

only, registered commenters weigh in on the same column, but in a more formal way.) Immediately after

the column appears online — often late at night — come early amens. Then dissent sets in, and a scolding

tone emerges (“You should know better”; “Surely you jest”). In the later hours, things get more plaintive

and surreal, as lonelier, insomniac imagery takes over and commenters begin to turn on one another.

(Around 2 a.m.: “What has happened to the soul of The Washington Post?” and “The blood is on your

hands. I’ll help you look for a rag, but don’t wipe it on my pants.”)

By the time the East Coast workday starts, responders seem showered, caffeinated and ready for battle.

Comments of 250 words or more show up, and sometimes they’re itemized. These itemized entries borrow

their structure from the blogosphere’s signature “fact-check,” a form in which a skeptic affects exhausted

patience as he paces through a published argument point by point to show how perniciously or laughably

wrong it is. These fact-checks are rarely potent enough to compel corrections by The Post, and Applebaum

never replies to them.

Commenters, in short, rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out

100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another. But most disappointing of all, for

readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for

example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is

retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.

Instead, paradoxically, commenters frequently reiterate Applebaum’s own arguments in the service of their

would-be critiques. Last year, for instance, when Applebaum described her newfound disillusionment with

John McCain, whom she supported for president in 2000, many commenters criticized her bygone support

for McCain by doing little more than rehashing her new case against him, which she had just presented.

This echo-chamber effect is unpleasant, and it makes it hard to keep listening for the clearer, brighter,

rarer voices nearly drowned out in the online din. Which is too bad: newspaper journalism benefits from

reader comments. Creating registration standards, inventive means of moderating and displaying

comments, membership benefits for regular posters and ratings systems for useful comments are just some

of the ways that other news outlets like Slate have improved the quality of reader responses.

On the other hand, the Slate comments on a recent Applebaum column are hardly models of astuteness.

What’s more, making commenters more accountable for their posts doesn’t exactly transform them into

the reverential chorus that every writer probably thinks he deserves. See Slate’s Joshua911, on Applebaum’s

column about a renovation at Monticello: “Awful place. Awful change. Awful analysis. Awful writer. Awful

country. Awful.” The audience for incantations like this one has got to be mostly Joshua911 himself. And

maybe nothing can — or even should — be done to curb entirely the brute urge of readers to defy what

they’ve read.