Eight Feet Deep

 It isn’t often that I am encour­aged by a defama­tion law­suit. You see, I am pretty big into free speech, if you haven’t noticed. I also was once sued for defama­tion. It wasn’t pretty and the alle­ga­tion wasn’t true. A fed­eral judge booted the case out on its res ges­tae where it belonged.

 But the legal action I am talk­ing about is one that could help erase the scourge that cheap­ens mod­ern mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion and raises the nation’s stu­pid­ity quo­tient. That would be hate­ful and libel­lous open com­ments on arti­cles pub­lished on the Inter­net that are writ­ten by anony­mous correspondents.

 The case involves a Ken­tucky attor­ney who is suing Kentucky.com, owned by the Lexington-Herald Leader. A per­son using a screen name allegedly made defam­a­tory com­ments against this attor­ney. The lawyer is defend­ing a man charged with mur­der and vio­lat­ing a domes­tic vio­lence order. The attor­ney says she just wants the real name of the per­son who made the com­ments so that she may take fur­ther legal action. She is, how­ever, seek­ing unspec­i­fied dam­ages plus those for pain and suffering.

 The edi­tor of the paper said the per­son mak­ing the com­ments was banned from the site and that the com­ments were removed. The paper is con­tact­ing that per­son to see if they want to invoke their rights to anony­mous free speech.

 Lest you think I may show some hypocrisy here sup­port­ing other forms of free speech but not anony­mous free speech, rest assured that I am not. But there are defama­tion laws and libel laws. That I know for sure and even though I may not like those laws when they are mis­used against me to dig into deeper pock­ets, I feel those statutes are there for long-held prin­ci­ples against bear­ing false wit­ness against one’s neighbor.

 My agree­ment with this suit is for much less loftier rea­sons though. I sim­ply am sick and tired of see­ing a bunch of racist, igno­rant, idiots dom­i­nate these com­ment boxes, say­ing what they want about whomever or what­ever most often with­out facts to back them up.

 What is even worse are news­pa­pers and other media plat­forms that use sites clum­sily dis­guised as not a part of that media out­let which are used to start or build upon con­tro­ver­sies employ­ing sub­tle, but incitable mate­r­ial. See: race baiting.

 News­pa­pers, especially, should reflect the soci­ety that sur­rounds it. But papers should also mir­ror the respect­ful­ness and good man­ners that are at the core of a civ­i­lized society.

 I don’t wish for any finan­cial ruin for any­one in the afore­men­tioned law­suit. I also hope it don’t lead to judi­cial prece­dent that would threaten free anony­mous speech. Some­times, that is the only way some peo­ple can com­ment with­out fac­ing some kind of phys­i­cal or eco­nomic dan­ger. But I do wish such an action could remind those with some sort of a media mouth­piece — be it The New York Times or eight feet deep — that anony­mous speech need be respon­si­ble speech.