A comment from Stan

Today we had the unparalleled pleasure of receiving a comment from a reader on the article responding to the announcement of the formation of an effort to establish an independent public broadcasting entity in the Valley.

Unfortunately, the commentator identified him or herself as “noname” and gave as his or her contact nomail@*******.com (we are not giving this address fully to protect that mailbox, if it exists, from an inundation of spam).

This is too anonymous for the public good, in our opinion.  It is not that we want to suppress anyone’s opinion. In fact, we quoted and answered noname’s question fully in a succeeding comment on the article.

But anonymous commentators, we have found, are less responsible and very often their comments descend into that miserable Net phenomenon, flaming–mere castigation and name calling.

We do want full public discussion of whatever comes up, but our philosophy on secrecy, stated in our catch phrase, “Why keep secrets? They make terrible pets,” will not allow complete anonymity for commentators.

Realizing that anonymity can be important in situations where employees of public institutions need to disclose problems in those institutions– whistleblowers, in other words–without endangering their emplyment or where a witness to crime may need protection from the perpetrators they identify, we have provided a private comment box on our Contact Us page.

As a result, we have reinstituted policy–lost during a system crash a few weeks ago–that requires commentators to log on as users before offering comment. We do not mean this to be taken as an unfriendly sign. Rather it is a policy directed at more open and intelligent discussion.

–Stan