O’Reilly Does TCT

Bill O’Reilly engaged in a galling act of comment trawling recently, and accused Arianna Huffington of Nazism for not moderating her comment threads harder. When Nancy Reagan went into the hospital, a HuffPost commenter wrote “Like her evil husband, she has lived far too long. Here’s hoping she dies in the tub.” That’s the only example O’Reilly had to offer and, from that, he barked “don’t you think Americans should start holding people like Arianna Huffington accountable for this? . . what’s the difference between the Ku Klux Klan and Arianna Huffington? What’s the difference?”

O’Reilly’s stance was so absurd that his guest Mary Katherine Ham, managing editor of ultra-conservative Townhall.com, said, “You're going to – you’re going to make me defend Arianna Huffington!” (MediaMatters has the transcript).

In a follow-up session, O’Reilly dug in. He quoted from a letter by Israel Gopstein, a man who lost several family members in the Holocaust: “the meaning of their deaths means more than a comparison to a meaningless blog.” O’Reilly patiently explained that the Nazis used newspapers and leaflets “ to build up enormous hatred towards your family. Today we’re seeing the same thing on the net here in America, there is no difference.” Israel, you fool! Why can’t you the obvious comparison between commenters and Nazis?

This is a perfect example of comment trawling in the original Drumian sense. An individual used an anonymous blog comment to castigate the blogger. It’s a practice whose effectiveness relies on the audience’s ignorance of blogging, commenting, and moderating, which is why Ham wasn’t willing to play along despite her ideological similarities to O’Reilly. As more and more people involve themselves in internet communities this kind of comment trawling will lose its rhetorical force. More people will realize that the opinions of commenters only represent the opinions of commenters.

This blog is centered on the idea that comment trawling is a valuable practice, but I want to distinguish what I do from the kind of comment trawling that O’Reilly’s Nazi smear represents. And I don’t want to concede the term to the bad guys; I want to reclaim the term. So, I’ve decided that “traditional comment trawling” (TCT) – what O’Reilly engaged in here – should be thought of as separate from comment trawling as I practice on this blog.

-- temperance