Daily Kos is a popular political blog that is unabashedly a haven for supporters of the Democratic Party. It is one of the blogs I check fairly often, especially when a big political story is breaking, because reading it is an excellent way to find out how fervent Democrats feel about things. It's not really a great place to learn about politics, though -- I always get the feeling that most of the posters and commentators on Daily Kos made up their own political opinions years ago, and so they no longer feel the need to articulate why they believe as they do. In other words, there's an awful lot of partisan cheerleading that goes on at Daily Kos. However, it is a blog with a huge and loyal audience; stories posted to the front page often yield hundreds of comments, and many "Kossacks" even write their own blogs, or "diaries," on the site. I always know there'll be something -- OK, a ton of stuff -- to read whenever I visit Daily Kos. The incendiary nature of some of the content that Daily Kos readers post has recently attracted the attention of Bill O'Reilly, the host of television's O'Reilly Factor, who has labeled Daily Kos a hate site.
Now, personally, I don't think of Daily Kos as a hate site, but that is largely because I tend to mentally separate user-generated blog content from blogger-generated content. Although not all blogs permit interaction, most blogs I visit do allow users to at least post comments in response to blog posts. I'm very accustomed to reading all kinds of blog comments -- some are hateful and offensive, true, but I honestly want to read hateful, offensive stuff every now and then if people out there are thinking it. That's part of the beauty of blogs and blogging: through the power of the Internet, one can find out what people really think. In any case, I tend to hold whoever posts something on the Internet responsible for the content of their own posts; I don't hold what someone posts as a comment or writes in a diary on Daily Kos against the people who actually run Daily Kos, for instance. O'Reilly, however, sees Daily Kos as a single entity: bloggers, audience, and crazy troll posters are all members of a vast Internet hatefest. He reasons that the administrators of Daily Kos would censor what is posted to their site if they did not agree with it. Certainly, the censorship that O'Reilly wants is practiced elsewhere on the Internet, but there are many blogs and web sites that prefer not to censor except in the most extreme circumstances, if even then. Daily Kos surely should not be vilified for supporting free speech. As it turns out, Daily Kos utilizes a sort of democratic censorship method for comments -- users can troll-rate particular comments so that they will be hidden from the view of most Daily Kos visitors. This system requires an active and fair user base...whether it works or not is a matter of opinion. O'Reilly certainly doesn't think it works very well, and I actually agree with him to an extent...but I hardly expect Daily Kos to be "fair and balanced" because it is partisan by design! At any rate, it is unfortunate that O'Reilly, a person who is both a fierce critic of traditional media and an active purveyor of new media, fails to understand the culture of blogging better.
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