My Letter to the Wall Street Journal
Terry Traub
June 16, 2006
I sent the following letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal after
they censored yet another of my postings to their online forum. I'm a little
fed up with this. It's one thing to censor obvious advertisements, junk
postings, and juvenile obscenities that contribute nothing to the discussion,
but it's quite another to cut relevant comments.
Dear editors,
For the past 20 years I have enjoyed participating in online discussions and I
must take exception to the way the Wall Street Journal handles its forums.
The other day I tried to post a comment in the discussion on Guantanamo in
which I drew a comparison with the more serious violations of human rights in
the world, notably China's prison system and historical events such
as the internment of 200,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. This
innocuous comment never appeared, while comments like this one are common:
Yea right Carlo! Like a couple of hundred extra Jihadis running loose are
going to tip the odds in their favor.
I know you particularly like believing the rubbish that this Administration
spews forth but most of the people they have detained are goat herders not
Carlos The Jackal like the Pentagon would have you believe.
What I really like about your posts Carlo is that they are as myopic as
your ideology; blind faith through and through. I never said turn tem
loose. Turn them over to their respective governments and let them deal
with their own prisoners.
If they end up back in the fight well, kill them then.
When are you and the rest of the arm chair generals on this site going to
realize that a large part of any campaign is public relations? We are
gaining no tangible, benefits either at home or abroad, by keeping them in
detention any longer.
Postings of a petty, partisan, and ad hominem nature are apparently welcome at
the Wall Street Journal while others are not. In the absence of any clear
posting guidelines, I have to conclude that you have some overly zealous
interns busy picking and choosing what comments they think should be posted in
your forums and what comments they find personally disagreeable and so are
quietly passed over.
In the past I have complained about this problem and was told that my comments
were not posted because I had not supplied my full name and location. So
instead of "ttraub" I put "Terry Traub". But alongside the postings of those
of us with the courage to post our identifying information in a public forum
are many "guest" postings with names that could easily be fabricated. I don't
see the point.
Such practices are inconsistent with the tradition of freedom of speech in this
country. You may argue that in a privately hosted forum you have the right to
censor whatever you feel like. I would respond that by doing so you undermine
the integrity of your newspaper which in the past has consistently fought
against political correctness and speech codes. I am dismayed and disappointed
in the Wall Street Journal and am contemplating terminating my subscription.
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