Several readers ask good questions about "hate mail." Let me try to answer some of them.

Laurent asks:

Has anyone actually seen these thousands of obscene emails that so traumatized Ms. Howell? Not a few here and there but a "storm of hate-mail" so bad that it "shocked" Mr. Downie, who I assume, given his line of work, has seen and heard all kinds of things and yet "couldn't believe" what he was seeing? Or is it all "according to the Post?"

The answer is, maybe somoene has seen the messages the Post considers most offensive, but I haven't, and nobody I know has. It's all "according to the Post."

Here's what I mean: As I understand how the Post screens its comments thread, it deletes messages it finds offensive more or less as they're being posted -- that is, the Post has people monitoring the threads who read and, when appropriate, delete messages. So some readers may have seen them before they were deleted, but they're not anywhere online now. (We do something similar at Salon; if someone submits posts a letter our editors deem offensive, it will stay live on the site until someone goes through the thread and deletes it.)

Many have pointed to a cache of letters posted at Democratic Underground. http://www.democraticunderground.com/archive/2006/wapo/

Reading this link, you don't see a great deal of terribly obscene letters. But according to Jim Brady, this page isn't the full record. The Post had been deleting messages all day, and we don't know what the Post deleted before this cache was saved. It's precisely this task of reading and deleting messages that Brady says led him to shut down comments and remove the thread entirely. At some point, the task of monitoring the very big thread became overwhelming, he says, and the quickest thing to do was just pull the whole thing down. (I didn't interview Brady; I'm referring to what he said to other reporters, as well as to the online chat I linked to in the story.)

Jbeach pointed to a DailyKos page which is also helpful:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/21/11010/7038

This page shows the difference between the letters at the Democratic Underground archive and the letters that the Post put up on Friday, after it had screened them. In other words, it contains letters that the Post says don't meet its standards of civility. Because this is based on the DU archive, you still won't see any of the most obscene letters in here (because Brady says those were deleted shortly after they were posted), but you will see some that, if not profane, aren't exactly in the Socratic tradition. EG:

This is pure B.S.

Posted by: res | Jan 19, 2006 12:39:35 PM | Permalink

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You're a hack, Howell.

Posted by: Old Hat | Jan 19, 2006 12:29:28 PM | Permalink

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But that's not a representative sample. Many letters look fine; they all just forcefully call Howell a liar and point out holes in her logic.

All of which is to say: So, we don't know what messages, exactly, Howell, Downie and others at the paper considered most vile. Howell told me there were many that were terribly obscene. For what it's worth, I believe her that there were some such messages. I've worked online for a while and know the kind of hate mail that can come in. (And it is "hate mail.")

But I still wonder why the Post deleted so many tamer letters, such as the ones at the DailyKos link. If these are kinds of letters the Post considers verboten on its site, I can see why people would say, as Jbeach does, that the "Post simply could not handle the embarrassment of it's ombudsman being spanked" for making mistakes.

Also, to the anonymous person calling himself "about ready to throw in the towel," who writes:

Farhad feels the need to wander into previous Salon letters to the editors blogs to defend fellow authors from the very same deserved criticisms. What a sham and a shame. You reporters need to stay in journalism school and take "Thicker Skin 101." Is it too much to insist that any news article get its facts straight and gets its facts checked before going to press? And then to retract, reprint, or at least actually apologise when they occasionally get it wrong?

So, towel, I have to say I don't understand why you think writers commenting in these threads is evidence of their thin skins, rather than just the opposite. I'm commenting here precisely because I feel that part of being a reporter online is to talk to people who write in. That's not a thin skin; it's a thick skin. When I make a mistake I'll correct it, retract it, or apologize for it. But when I see people calling out something that isn't a mistake, why shouldn't I defend it?

Indeed, this gets to the heart of the matter in this case, doesn't it? Wouldn't it have been easier if, instead of allowing days and days of anger to build up in response to her Sunday column, Howell had instead simply got online early and just responded to her critics? She told me that she'd planned all along on correcting herself this Sunday; during the middle of the week, though, she decided to go online and post something. I think she should have said something sooner, and then she ought to have argued directly with her critics in the comments thread.

In my experience the most vile comments come from people who don't expect you to respond; when they think they're having a conversation with nobody, they feel free to tell me to do several anatomically impossible sexual maneuvers. But once people know you'll be open to their arguments and ready to counter with your own -- and Howell clearly has her own arguments in the matter -- they're much less uncivil, and willing to keep their comments substantive. Which is as it should be.