john, the pope is a twat. get over it.”

“I’ve seen orangutans with Down Syndrome make more effective arguments than that needle-dick-son-of-a-bitch McAfee”

“Travis is hung like a 4 year old mughet.”

Two of these messages were posted on The Red & Black’s Web site. One of them was scrawled on a bathroom wall in a bar downtown. Can you discern a difference in their quality?

I can’t.

They all are also likely products of presumably educated University students who are hiding behind a protective veil of anonymity.

I am not deeply concerned with the moral question of whether people should fling around this sort of inappropriate garbage about their fellow man. The duty of teaching people common decency is up to their mothers, religious leaders and Saturday morning cartoons.

The real question is, should The Red & Black grant anonymity to caustic commentators such as CL and ha.ha – the phantom authors of the above comments that muck up its web publication?

In print, the names of letter writers and reporters are published.

Why, then, does The Red & Black, along with many other news organizations, publish anonymous posts online?

People say the free-wheeling perpetual communication of the Internet should not be constrained. If you force people to accurately identify themselves, or submit to a log-in procedure, online participation might take a hit.

Inevitably, the marketplace of ideas would be stunted by this effect, and everyone would lose a supposedly valuable source of information. The Internet is billed as some sort of First Amendment holy land, and news organizations are reluctant to mar its beautiful binary surface.

I like this idea – but I just don’t buy it.

If you have something terribly important to say, put your name on it. Fate favors the bold. If you want to spread a message, why not share your identity? People will not support a cause that has no leader.

But if you want to broadcast something of little import, something that does not advance the public dialogue in a meaningful way, perhaps you should find something better to do with your time. Start a blog like everyone else. Everybody wins.

Of course every journalist knows that in some cases, anonymity is important – Deepthroat of Watergate fame comes to mind. But that sort of situation is different from allowing online commentators to spew vitriol at other people and hide from public identification.

The decision to withhold a source’s name should be made with the same stringent standard on-line as it is in print.

Before you – or my fellow journalists – grab pitchforks and torches, let me be clear: I am a huge fan of our First Amendment rights. I am not easily offended, and it takes more than a flurry of flagrant four-letter words to hurt my feelings. I say, let all posts stay up – aside from those that are libelous.

But do not allow the writers to hide – untouchable and nameless – behind the integrity of our paper.

Publishing a letter or column written by someone outside of the staff, lends credibility to that writer and accepts legal and moral responsibility for it.

This principle is widely ignored online. The Red & Black, like many news Web sites, takes no responsibility for comments posted on the page, and simply reserves the right to delete those it finds overly objectionable.

The rest of the Internet is filled with much unedited, unidentified and unverifiable rubbish. The Red & Black, and other news organizations, should stand apart from that – just as they set themselves apart in print from propaganda and sensational tabloids.

Do not freely lend out The Red & Black’s credibility. Let the CLs and ha.ha.s of the world don the spandex of their Internet disguises somewhere else and remain as they are – anonymous nobodies.

Let the newspaper sites maintain a level of respect that is impervious to the shameless anonymity of “Internet culture.”

Our industry is shifting away from print.

Journalists must not leave behind the principles of transparency, accountability and decency that our predecessors upheld for these 200-plus years of American journalism simply because the medium is changing.

- Louie Brogdon is a senior from McDonough majoring in newspapers.