Let's take a recent local story, as reported in both organs. The story involves a man who was smoking at the West Oakland station and when cops confronted him they say he freaked out and "resisted violently" and then when he was trying to pull a gun out he accidentally shot himself. I mean, that's what the cops say happened. I have no idea what actually happened because I wasn't there. None of the commenters you will read were there either, as far as I know.
SFGate:
And SFist:
Below are a selection of comments. HERE'S WHERE YOU COME IN. Try to guess which site the comment came from, SFist or SFGate. Ready?
It usually isn't ordinary tobacco I smell at Bart stations. Now we got a mix of gun smoke mixed in as well. Glad he accidently shot himself before he could shoot anyone else.
Great. Here come the white guilt protests tonight, please don't fuck up my commute home, kthx.
Considering they shut down part of the freeway the other night in protest of a car jacker with a gun getting shot by OPD, I think there will definitely be a protest about this.
Where are the protesters? I guess black lives don't matter in Oakland.
BART should close West Oakland, Fruitvale and MacArthur stations. Trips would get faster and crime would drop. I'd say close 16th St. in SF also but that area is gentrifying quite a bit (except the area right around the BART station, ironically).
This all means something, I guess.
Answers: gate, fist, fist, gate, gate
Both sites have long had their share of angry, crazy, racist, reactionary characters, including myself. Years ago I was banned from SFist comments because of personal antipathy between myself and longtime editor Brock Keeling, and I've never bothered to appeal the exile, though my blog is an occasional link item in their daily roundups since he's wandered off to Modern Luxury.
ReplyDeleteSFGate comments sites are interesting because you can actually point people to better information than they are getting from the local paper/website of record. It's also fun for shaming journalists who are terribly sanctimonious about their ethics while not realizing quite how thoroughly they are being used by their publishers.
I had no idea you were banned from SFist comments, Michael! That is badass.
ReplyDeleteI've never read deep enough into an SFGate comment section to find anything useful like you're talking about. I usually can't get past the WHY IS THIS NEWS or MORE ILLEGAL ALIENS.
You should check out the SFGate comments on Dear Abby columns! It is nuts to me that someone would even bother, but they do. Oh, they do.
ReplyDelete