You end your piece with a parallel between Pro Sports and athletes suggesting to "respect the game". And yet, as the players who take the field for each game it would appear that professional journalists are rigging their own game; throwing it even.

For example, on the same day you write about this phenomena there are these closing lines to a piece over on the Huffington Post which also uses a sports analogy:

'The media's willingness to take punt after punt, and allow the administration to "control" its "message," is part of what got us into this historically disastrous debacle, and what's still allowing Bush to punt this entire war down to the next president.

It would be a lot harder for the administration to play games with the lives of other people's children if the press refused to play along.'

[Source]:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-administration-punts-_b_39958.html

Perhaps it's time to stop viewing it as simply a "game" or athletic contest, aye?

Gary says, "Publications will doubtless come up with ways to filter the reader dreck. (At Salon, we have a few simple changes in the works.)"

All I can say is "Hallelujah!" The readers comments add a lot to interesting articles. However, as for all sites that open up, the trolls have arrived. Some are really vile and running into one of them really spoils it. I wouldn't allow someone to come to a party at my home and say what the trolls do. A refusal to stop them in the name of "free speech" isn't "liberal" it's just stupid. Doing so makes a really good feature of Salon even better.

The sheer amount of comments make filtering the dreck from the gems a near impossible task in online forums; but the sheer number also almost assures that there will indeed be a few gems. In my experience, the best results come when there is some sort of comment rating / filtering system, and when posters are required to register accounts. As an illustrative example, compare the comments of these three websites (all "community blogs" focused on news/politics/etc):

http://www.treesandthings.com (requires registration, allows for filtering and rating)

http://www.plastic.com (does not require registration, allows filtering and rating)

http://www.metafilter.com/ (requires registration, no filtering, no rating)

Each has its good and bad points, but it's obvious that filtering, rating, and requiring registration each have a specific effect. My preference is probably for the plastic.com model (slashdot is very similar, but with a technology focus), but there are benefits to be gained from requiring registered accounts. Overall it's definitely something that a lot of thought should go into. In particular, I think that community moderation (like treesandthings or plastic) is the key to success. Having an editor or an intern do moderation will inevitably lead to readers becoming pissed at Salon due to (what they will perceive to be) unneeded / unwanted / unfair "censorship" of their letters.

I have a love/hate relationship with the letters section of Salon. There's something about it that I just can't look away from - its' the online equivalent to the VH1 reality TV show Flava of Love.

Perhaps what is so compelling to me about the letters section is that the drama which is present, the low-brow name calling, the heady, arrogant arguments, the constant readers who write in saying "THIS is why I don't read Salon anymore" even though they're clearly still reading it, and yse, a few useful chestnuts of wisdom tucked in between. I don't get that kind of drama anywhere else in my real life. I live in a boring world of civility.

One thing I fear about readers weighing in, though, is that it adds to this "team" mentality that has somehow formed in our country. The pop culture teams are Team Aniston and Team Jolie, Team O'Donnell or Team Trump, and can be worn emblazoned on a $60 t-shirt from Kitson. The political teams however, are much more insidious. Team Bush is Evil and Team Liberals Rule the Media. Team I Support the Troops and Team Chicken-Hawks Go Home. The blogs can be used as backup for either team's position, and also as fodder for demonstrating how ridiculous the other team is. It fosters and encourages a sense of dangerous superiority in the readers, one which asserts that their position is unassailably correct. Its irresponsible to create this kind of reckless partisanship and I worry that the division is something we won't soon be able to overcome as a nation.

"It should be noted that some of these attacks have an ugly misogynistic aspect. At Salon, but I believe not just at Salon, a disproportionate number of nasty posts are directed at women writers...It's hard to say whether this is a result of the tendency of women to write more personal essays than men, or simple misogyny (though many of the abusive posters are themselves female).

This is the most troubling aspect of the decline of the letter sections' tenor. There are in particular a small handful of "Angry White Males" (two spring to mind in particular) who are absolutely frothing at the mouth at any article in support of feminism, multiculturalism, or anything else they howl at as being "Pee Cee".

Other woman writers (such as Heather H., who writes on television) they attack for... I don't know. Being secret feminists, I guess.

This is in part due to Salon's regrettable decision to segregate "women's news" in "Broadsheet", which has resulted in the ghettoization of some important stories on a pink page with a vicious, seething pool of misogynistic letters right underneath it. I believe the visible segregation of women to a corner of Salon has created a sort of feminist lightening-rod that primes the misogynists to hate female writers across the board.

As for "many of the abusive posters" being "themselves female", I am perfectly convinced that many of those are our Angry White Boys in drag. On the internet, nobody knows you're a frothing, rabid dog.