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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."

Yesterday's Washington Post included a piece by Howard Kurtz with the following lede: "CBS executives have decided there is no future role at the network for Dan Rather, making it certain that the man who sat in the anchor chair for 24 years will depart by this fall." The Associated Press yesterday reported much the same: "CBS executives and Rather's representatives appear close to a deal that will end Rather's association with CBS News after more than 40 years, according to an executive knowledgeable about the situation who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity on Thursday."

The sources for the stories were anonymous, and the speculation nothing new – for months there had been talk that Rather would be leaving CBS News in the near future. But two major news organizations, citing CBS executives, had thrown their weight behind the story, and it took off, becoming one of ABCNews.com and CNN.com's top stories and appearing on the
MSNBC.com homepage.

The development left CBSNews.com in a tough position. “We talked it over [yesterday] morning, and decided that because the story is about CBS News, we have to be more thorough," says Mike Sims, CBSNews.com director of news and operations. "The story carries more gravity than it does on other sites because it's about CBS News. I asked our folks to call the CBS News press office, do reporting on it, and include that.”

They did. According to Mary-Jayne McKay, senior producer at CBSNews.com, “we went to CBS publicity and got a comment on it from [CBS spokeswoman] Sandy Genelius, which was no comment. We were working from the AP story -- we had no inside information, even though some people might assume we do.”

A story about Rather went up yesterday on CBS News’ recently-launched entertainment site, Showbuzz. None was posted on the main CBSNews.com site. "It was not a must run, because there was no advancement," says Sims. "For the past two months there was speculation about this. I tend not to be big on speculation stories."

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Yesterday, news that a suspect had been charged with the murder of New York City graduate student Imette St. Guillen was one of the top stories at CBSNews.com. The CBS affiliate in New York has since scored an exclusive interview with the suspect, and today he was indicted. As a result, the case has remained among the top stories.

It’s received quite a bit of prominent coverage on CBSNews.com as well as pretty much every other news Web site, not to mention newspapers and cable news channels.

The New York and Boston tabloids (St. Guillen was originally from Boston) have given the story a particularly substantial amount of coverage. In today’s Boston Phoenix, Mark Jurkowitz took a close look the battle of coverage among the Boston dailies as well as a brief glance at how the New York Post and The Daily News have handled it (with headlines that appear to have come “straight out of a fright flick.”)

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Last week, I wrote about CBS News' policy concerning whether or not to name the 16-year-old boy arrested in connection with the murder of Pamela Vitale. At the time, CBS elected not to name the boy, despite the fact that some news organizations were doing so. Linda Mason, CBS News Senior Vice President, Standards and Special Projects, explained the policy:

Adults we do sometimes identify, but juveniles – we protect them, especially when law enforcement says they're not going to use their name…The issue is not that they did or did not do it. The issue is that they're kids. Just as there are juvenile courts, we make a distinction with kids under 18.

Now, however, CBS News, like most other media outlets, is using the boy's name. Here is the second sentence in today's piece on the Vitale murder, which is now appearing on the CBSNews.com website:

16-year-old Scott Dyleski, who's accused of killing Vitale, will be tried as an adult.

The story goes on to give background about Dyleski's family and personal life, and includes a photo of the boy. I asked Mike Sims, director of News and Operations at CBSNews.com, to explain the change.



"In discussions with Linda Mason, it was determined that if he was charged as an adult, we would name him. And since he was charged, we did so," said Sims. He added, "The fact that he's facing adult charges as opposed to juvenile charges – which in many states are expunged or held privately – makes it a different ballgame."



Certainly, the fact that law enforcement officers are now using Dyleski's name, and the fact that his records are now public, does change the ballgame. But the change also raises the question: When a 16-year-old becomes an adult in the eyes of the law, is the media right to follow?

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