Audience Comments and the Civic Space that Rarely Was

As more and more news organizations shutter their comment sections, it is worth considering what they mean (or, rather, meant) to journalism and to journalists. How do we explain their demise and is this a loss worth mourning? If there is a resounding theme throughout the ample academic literature about journalists’ attitudes to comments it is that journalists never quite adopted them into their working routines. In such literature, journalists were frequently cast as the enemies of progress, whether as technological luddites unable to get to grips with emergent technologies or as turf-protecting zealots resentful of the eroding boundaries of their field. It would seem that these obstinate traditionalists simply did not grasp the ideals of the Internet as “the democratic space upon which citizens and journalists interact more porous, pluralistic, and directly representative” (Papacharissi, 2009, p. viii). Scholars, naturally, did. This utopian view of comments, and the wider digital infrastructure they represented, always seemed to me to be curiously out of step with what I was seeing in, and hearing about, actual comment sections. With academic journal article after academic journal article extolling the virtues of comment sections as spaces for citizen deliberation and press criticism, I must admit to some envy at the comment sections that the authors of these scholarly works must have been coming across. Quite unlike the comment sections I was encountering, and hearing journalists complain about, in article after article, in publication after publication. What good fortune, indeed! In what I view as a seminal review of the research about audience participation in the digital journalism literature, Peters and Witschge (2015) note a shift away from a more-or-less traditional emphasis on the duty of journalists to provide the means for citizens to participate in democracy (what they call participation through news) to an emergent duty of journalists to provide the means for citizens to participate in the journalistic process (what they call participation in news). This is an eloquent way of articulating something that is, at its core, quite troubling. How, then, do we explain journalistic resistance to comment sections? Here, I offer an analogy. Assessing the dominance of the objectivity norm in U.S. journalism, Michael Schudson (2001) notes that “explaining the articulation of a norm is part of explaining the norm” (p. 150). Rejecting economically and technologically deterministic explanations for objectivity’s emergence and hegemony, Schudson notes that objectivity has persisted – for better or for worse – because it is cloaked in a moral discourse that directs action. In other words, journalists rationalize their routines and behaviors if they view them as servicing a larger mission. It is, by now, something of a truism that the disintegration of U.S. journalism’s economic model means that journalists are perennially trying to do more with less. As I consider these harassed, overworked journalists being tasked with managing comment sections awash with misinformation (Hinnant, Subramanian, & Young, 2016), xenophobia (Antony & Thomas, 2017), and hate speech (Wilhelm & Joeckel, 2019), is it any wonder that they responded so unenthusiastically? Why would we expect them to delight in laboring in service of a working routine so profoundly unmoored from how they view their democratic role?