In my writing about U.S. politics, I focus on language because campaigns are language driven. But there are definitely other determining factors, most notably imagery and social relationships.

Is the policy online anywhere? I’m creating a resource page on Dealing with Hate Speech and Trolls for a a workshop at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference and it would be great to add a link to this under the “Blog moderation policies and strategies” section.

I do think the “no flaming” rule is extremely important. Not sure how many people here are familiar with Susan Herring’s work, but it’s very relevant – for example, her 2001 paper on Gender and Power in Online Communications. Clay Shirky’s 2003 essay A group is its own worst enemy is also very good.

So why would the ones that hold 90% of the wealth in this country expend any of that on media and commentators other than Conservatives? The only way I see those on the left or progressives being able to make any money from their “art” of speaking is through alternative media. Olbermann is on Cable, and that’s precisely an area where the FCC haven’t stripped diversity and where small, but significant, audiences can be reached and advertisers have to support the programs or not reach that audience. The model is more like the internet (but look out if the PROFIT model is imposed here, too…). But in the BROADCAST industry, where the airwaves are limited- Conservatives have taken total control. Progressive talk radio has been taken off the air in Sacramento, Boston, Fresno, San Diego, Madison, WI, Austin, New Haven, Eugene, and Columbus, OH.

The “profit” model simply doesn’t work when there is a resource that is limited. THAT’s the problem…Thinking that one is going to be able to make any sort of case banning the words “war”, “murder”, and “battle” until after 10 PM (so kids can’t hear them) is so far-fetched that it would be laughed at as the ultimate liberal version of a nanny-state.

For millions of years there was no such thing as the….

remote control.

A lot of what is implicit in your argument has been hotly debated by anthropological linguists at several causational-affective levels. The idea that our language shapes, rather than simply describes, our culture was first proposed in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…..hypothesis">Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis . The hypothesis still remains controversial and is the ongoing subject of much research. There’s been a lot of interest in this…do the Navaho…who have no temporal participles have a different sense of time than people’s that do? Do cultures that have only four or three primary colors “see” the world differently than those cultures in which dozens of colors have distinctive names?

Certainly “hot button” speech seems to be effective in generating emotion, or it wouldn’t be used. But there are others who argues that such exagerated rhetoric actually dampens its impact on listeners over time. When everything is a “battle” or “war” (for ratings, sales, the TV remote) it could be argued that it has the effect of emotional disattachment from REAL wars.

In addition to having great commenters at FDL, the site Administrator and a large crew of site moderators (”mods”) spend a huge number of hours reading comments. All doing this on a voluntary basis. I’m not a mod, so I am not speaking with authority, but some of the basic guidelines are no threats of violence, no hate speech, no flaming other commenters- disagree with the idea but don’t flame the person.