The Virginian Pilot cleans up its website, ignores the cause.

The Virginian Pilot has decided the anonymous comments degrade the quality of its website so they have decided that if people are going to be impolite, they will have to do it under their real names. I have to agree that anonymity give many people a cover to say a lot of obnoxious things.

But …. you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you? But where did the people whose foam flecked fingers write those hate-notes learn their craft? Unfortunately, they are the product of the Unofficial School of Journalism. Yes, folks, the “wingers” and “a**s-hats” were taught by those great folks who brought you the Virginian Pilot, MSNBC and the Comedy Channel, just for starters. The difference is that the anonymous commenters don’t have editors to clean up their grammar and didn’t get a degree in English Lit. so they’re a little cruder.

They strive to provide the same message as Daryl Lease, editorial writer for the Virginian Pilot who wrote this column which he used to club Christine O’Donnell and the Tea Party like a baby seal. In the course of a single column we find 6 references to “witch,” 4 to “Tea” and several not-so-subtle references to O’Donnell’s illiteracy, all wrapped in the theme that dressing up like patriots is a really stupid idea. Lease imagines himself something of a political humorist. In reality he’s simply a political bomb thrower who’s paid to polish his bombs before throwing, something that the anonymous commenters on the Pilot’s website don’t have the luxury of doing.

One of the great benefits of the internet is that it has freed the previously passive recipient of the MFM’s bile from having to sit and take it. The alternative was a letter to the editor – which was then at the not-so-tender mercies of the same people who were busy insulting their readers in the first place. I don’t know why people feel compelled to respond on a paper’s website. The Internet is out there. Start your own blog. Be your own editor. Seize control.