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**Bumped Up From TAMWire. Posted By RedMoonProject**

The editors at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch have decided that they want to have “a meaningful discussion about race.” And they are so serious about this that they are going to refuse to listen to their readers about it. They are turning off their comments in the hope of elevating the level of conversation.

Seriously.

Now stop laughing. No, I mean it. Stop laughing. STOP LAUGHING. Don’t you understand that you are too stupid to comment on these sorts of serious matters? Didn’t you listen to Gruber talk about you little people? Really, this is why the elites don’t want to listen to you people. You just have far too many opinions that have not been approved by all of those smart people who went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Via St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Editorial: No comments. An experiment in elevating the conversation

For the next two months, we are turning off the comment function on all editorials, columns and letters in the opinion section.

Why?

Ferguson.

Last Sunday, we challenged our region to have the serious discussion on race that it has been avoiding for decades. Such difficult discussions are made more challenging when, just to present a thoughtful point of view, you have to endure vile and racist comments, shouting and personal attacks.

If you’ve watched many of the talking heads on cable television try to discuss the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, you know what we’re talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes comments on newspaper stories and columns have a similar effect.

In fact, it has a name: “The nasty effect.”

….Ever since newspapers started putting stories on the Internet, there has been a vigorous debate within the industry about the effect of reader comments. The Post-Dispatch has made efforts to improve the level of discussion in comment sections, but there are wins and losses.

Recently, the news service Reuters decided to get rid of comments on its stories. The online startup Vox doesn’t allow commenting.

We intend to use our opinion pages to help the St. Louis region have a meaningful discussion about race. So we are going to turn off the comments in the editorial section for a while, and see what we learn from it. (Comment will continue on news articles). Comments might return to the opinion pages. Or we might find that without them, the discussion — through letters, social media conversations and online chats, rises to a higher level….