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Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to "the volume and the persistence" of the objectionable comments.

There has been a fierce debate about how news outlets should handle reader comments. Washingtonpost.com's Jim Brady, whose site, like CBSNews.com, does not have the resources to filter comments in advance, told Howard Kurtz that he'd "rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all."

But Post reporter Darryl Fears told Kurtz that comments should be eliminated if they can't be pre-screened for offensiveness.

"If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he said.

CBSNews.com has no plans to disable comments on stories about the other presidential candidates, according to Sims. As for comments on Obama stories, he said the site is open to eventually bringing them back.

"We'd like to be able to return to them, and I'm not ruling that out," said Sims. "But at this point it's not possible."

As I noted earlier, CBS News has decided not to name the accuser in the Duke rape case. But some denizens of the Internet have other ideas: Her name has started popping up on CBSNews.com today, in the comments section of the site. According to Mike Sims, CBSNews.com Director of News and Operations, the site will not be deleting the comments that mention her name.

"The name was used by a member of the public on our message boards, and in this case we will let it stand because it's in the public comment area," says Sims. "Although CBS News won't use the name in our reporting, we're going to leave it there because it has been reported widely in the mainstream media, both in her community and across the country." Sims says the site prefers not to delete comments whenever possible.

"If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments. You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."

--Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears, who believes that reader comments on stories should be eliminated if the Post cannot filter out offensive comments in advance. Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady told Howard Kurtz he lacks the resources to screen all the comments that come in daily.

A group of conservative bloggers – not to mention folks like Sean Hannity – are upset over some nasty comments that were posted in the comments section of the liberal Huffington Post Web site in the wake of the bombing near Vice President Cheney. A number of commenters expressed their disappointment that Cheney hadn't been killed.

The dustup sheds a light on an unfortunate habit of partisans on both sides, who love to publicize nasty rhetoric in order to illustrate the wrong-headedness of their ideological opponents. You might call it the Ward Churchill strategy. Churchill, as you may know, is a (once) obscure professor who wrote a ridiculous essay comparing the victims of the September 11th attacks to Nazis. As I noted in CJR Daily in 2005, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly decided that the Churchill affair was a huge story – he covered it an astounding 25 times in a four-month period.

Churchill is the kind of guy who makes liberals look like wackos – just like the commenters who expressed sadness when the vice president wasn't killed. There is a reason partisans might want to think twice before employing the Ward Churchill strategy, however – a reason aside from the inherent intellectual dishonesty of shining a light on unimportant figures in order to push an agenda. There are Ward Churchills on both sides, after all, as a visit to the comments section of a site like Free Republic quickly reveals. And I'm not sure how getting into a your-freaks-are-worse-then-ours tit-for-tat benefits anyone in the long run.

If you are a reader of the Public Eye comments section, you might have noted that some commenters tend to get very … fired up, let's say, about certain issues. That type of enthusiasm (and typically colorful use of the English language) sometimes tends to be the case when it comes to communication between news outlets and their audiences.

In the interest of such interactivity, The San Francisco Chronicle has unveiled a new feature in which the paper highlights some of the comments that readers make – via voicemail – that don't make it into the paper as letters to the editor. It's called, "Correct Me If I'm Wrong...".

And in one of the feature's first editions, the paper has a little fun.

One recent submission was an example of such a fired up commenter, who took issue with the paper's use of the phrase "pilotless drones" in a photo caption. He's quite miffed about it, actually. You can listen to it here.

Someone else, upon hearing that reader's complaint, took issue with the complaint itself in another voicemail.

Then someone went to YouTube and slapped together a music video looping some choice phrases from the original complaint. Someone else chose clips from the complaint and turned them into ring tones. And now, we're blogging about it.

As you'll see, politicians are not the only ones whose virally distributed inappropriate statements can come back to haunt them.

Last night's "60 Minutes" piece on Joe Namath closed with correspondent Bob Simon asking Namath if he would like to remarry.

"Oh, I’ve thought about companionship, getting married," says Namath. "And you know what? It’s a difficult thing to find someone that you want to share the rest of your life with, or even a lot of time with."

Replies Simon: "And when this airs, Joe, those calls will start coming in."

"I hope so," Namath responds. "I’m game."

Simon, it seems, didn't know the half of it. By this morning, the Web version of the Namath story already had six pages of comments, many of them from women who want to meet Broadway Joe. Some even left their email addresses and phone numbers. "I'd love to have you meet me, a 55 yr-old teacher," writes one woman. "I am fun, sincere, and trustworthy...also available." Another advertises herself as a "mentor, a confidant, a friend. 48, 116, a BLONDE!"

The comments ranged from sweet – a 15-year-old who wants to set his mom up with Namath – to something else entirely. One woman promises to "e-mail you a picture of me in my bikini," while another writes "i worked at mr.pips as a cocktail waitress after leaving new york as a playboy bunny in the new york club. My name is debra." Others were nothing if not direct. "Please pass this on to Mr. Namath: Here I am, Joe! Come and get me."

CBSNews.com Director of News and Operations Mike Sims has ordered his staff to remove any comments that that include an email address and/or phone number, despite the fact that such comments do not seem to violate the Web site's "Rules Of Engagement." I asked him why. "I'm not sure people realize how many millions of people will see these phone numbers and email addresses," says Sims. "I think in the long run they'll thank us."

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You may have noticed that the comments function has been disabled on certain posts both here at Public Eye and elsewhere on the site. Comments are no longer being allowed on any of the stories or posts about Ed Bradley, the longtime CBS News fixture who passed away yesterday morning. Why? Despite hundreds of people who left remembrances and condolences in the comments, there were a handful who insisted on posting remarks considered inappropriate. Mike Sims, director of news and operations at CBSNews.com explained his decision to discontinue comments:

We invite people into our home to engage in lively, diverse discussion. We insist on civility and respect. We will not tolerate defamatory remarks or bigotry. Those who cannot respect these simple rules are not welcome. In this particular case, a few people who could not and would not respect our rules required us to pull the comments area entirely.

You can see a sample of the kinds of remembrances most commenters were leaving in this story. If youYou may have noticed that the comments function has been disabled on certain posts both here at Public Eye and elsewhere on the site. Comments are no longer being allowed on any of the stories or posts about Ed Bradley, the longtime CBS News fixture who passed away yesterday morning. Why? Despite hundreds of people who left remembrances and condolences in the comments, there were a handful who insisted on posting remarks considered inappropriate. Mike Sims, director of news and operations at CBSNews.com explained his decision to discontinue comments:

We invite people into our home to engage in lively, diverse discussion. We insist on civility and respect. We will not tolerate defamatory remarks or bigotry. Those who cannot respect these simple rules are not welcome. In this particular case, a few people who could not and would not respect our rules required us to pull the comments area entirely.

You can see a sample of the kinds of remembrances most commenters were leaving in this story. If you’re fortunate, you didn’t have to read some of the comments that caused all of them to be pulled. News organizations have long been wary of allowing comments on their sites for this exact reason – civility. Normally, the debate over proper conduct takes place in stories revolving around politics, like the Washingtonpost.com dust up with bloggers earlier this year.

Some bloggers don’t even allow comments at all because they don’t want to have to police them or be associated with something they have little control over. The two-way conversation is increasingly becoming an ingrained part of the media landscape, however, and it’s important to set boundaries for these exchanges. The challenge is to find the best ways to continue the conversation despite the best efforts of a few to spoil it.

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Good news for all our regular commenters (and those we'd like to see become regular commenters) -- the comments feature is back up and working! Now, as a note of caution, this is a problem we've experienced off and on for a few days and we could have some more snags so we're counting on you to help us recognize them. Find something you've tried to post isn't showing up? Shoot us a note so we can get started on correcting the problem. Until then, post away.

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If you've tried to leave a comment to one of our posts and find it hasn't shown up don't fret, it's our fault not yours. We're currently experiencing some problems with that part of the blog. It seems that sometimes the comments function is working, at other times, it’s not. We’re trying to get this problem solved as quickly as possible but in the meantime, don’t stop trying altogether. If you’re running into a brick wall in the comments, feel free to email us your thoughts and we’ll find a way to share them. If you’re trying to get a question to Ed Bradley for our “10 Plus 1” feature, the best bet is to shoot it to us via email. Thanks for your patience, we’re working on the problem.

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It appears the technical problems have been fixed and the comments are back up and ready for your posts. Comments posted earlier were not lost and will appear in the comments section. Thanks for the patience, now fire away with your thoughts and observations.

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