By Roy Peter Clark
Senior Scholar and Vice President

If we crave a civil discourse about incivility, we might begin by gazing through the various frames people build to express their opinions on this topic. These frames contain sets of values, which exist in tension if not in conflict. When these values compete, one instinct is to retreat inside one of them. A better move is to work toward a set of standards and practices in which some of these values can co-exist, if not be reconciled.

Frame #1. The Freedom Frame: Those who see the problem through this frame value freedom of expression as a primary value. They sometimes cite the First Amendment, an argument that may confuse the right to speak with the duty to publish. Democracy is messy and impolite, they argue. Over time civility has been used as a weapon of oppression against words or ideas at the margins of acceptability or antagonistic to the status quo. Our ability to tolerate even obnoxious expression is a sign of our strength. While traditional newspapers provided few opportunities for public comment and expression, the Internet has democratized expression as never before. The examples of crude extremism should be interpreted not as a vice of new media, but as a virtue. Obnoxious speech can be tolerated, even if it's not encouraged.

Frame #2. The Responsibility Frame: Those who see through this frame argue that with all freedoms come responsibilities, not just for news organizations, but for any person who chooses a public platform for expression. Responsible restraint includes not publishing certain military secrets, or directions for building bombs, or promoting the abuse of children, or threatening someone's life. In our day, it also includes taking special care with language that insults a person on the basis of race, gender and other familiar categories of identity. Through this frame, words like community, dialogue and conversation are valued -- sometimes at the expense of unfettered speech. The worry is that crude or hateful speech crowds out responsible speech and chases away many who might want to be included. Obnoxious speech, they argue, crowds out reasonable speech.

Frame #3. The Business Frame: Those who see through the business frame invoke a duty to create healthy, profitable news enterprises. They argue that we are in the midst of a technological and media revolution in which news Web sites will soon become the first place most people turn for breaking news. While newspapers experience drops in circulation and advertising revenue, more money is being made on the Web -- but, right now, not enough to offset the losses experienced in traditional media. Who will pay for good journalism? What does a viable new business model look like? What we need, they argue, is more and more business on the Web, more and more eyeballs on the page. On the Internet, readers demand interactivity. Unbridled comment sections are central to the culture of new media. Some controls are necessary and desirable, but current budgets cannot afford the manpower necessary to preview hundreds of comments in advance of publication. Nor do they want to assume the legal responsibilities that come with the decision to preview and edit public commentary.

Frame #4: The Journalism Frame: Those who see through this frame argue that, while journalism changes all the time, some values in the practice of journalism should endure -- even when challenged by social, political and technological shifts. One traditional value requires journalists to check things out before publication. Journalists also value the process of editing, protocols of judgment based on experience and buttressed by sets of standards and practices. To support their arguments, they would cite cases in which people's lives and reputations were damaged by lies, fabrications, misrepresentations, identity piracy or threats online. They would likely argue that -- at least within journalism Web sites -- a culture of civil discourse must be encouraged and enforced, that new-media owners must provide the resources necessary to make this work.

Frame #5: The Self-Policing Frame: Those who see through this frame argue that there is wisdom in the collective, that truth can be achieved over time, and that the best online communities of interest are self-regulating. They cite evolving practices that have helped shape, in a short period of time, the cultures, communities and markets expressed via the Internet. These practices, they argue, help correct the record; hold traditional journalists' feet to the fire; marginalize the worst offenders; give authority to the most reliable commentators; and democratize a process that in the hands of traditional journalists has become something of a self-anointed priesthood.

Those who develop standards for news Web sites will be drawing on all these arguments, no doubt, and many more. On this issue, it may turn out that some yet-to-be identified center will hold -- and not the extremes. Comment without boundaries creates a wasteland in which reason cannot breathe. And comment surrounded by palisades ostracizes points of view all citizens need to face.

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