Yes, I'm an elitist and a meritocrat - I believe that there tend to be experts in any given field and I'm quite willing to shut up, let them talk, and think about what they said. And I don't see how "opening the phones" necessarily improves the quality of what they have to say, or my own private deliberations on what was said.
But at least in talk radio, there's someone (presumably the person who answers the phone) who winnows out the real flakes. It isn't full peer review by any means, but at least the screening process tends to weed out some of the most incomprehensible commentators. But this doesn't exist on the Internet - anyone can say anything they want, wherever they want, and reading their comments is often very bad for my health.
Some comments are just completely incomprehensible, and lead me to suggest that drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels may not be the right way to prepare for writing a comment on an Internet news story. Others are so poorly written I can't figure out what they're saying, usually because the commentator is either illiterate or has lapsed into some kind of Twitterspeak that I can't follow. I'm no Hemingway, but even I get twitchy when I see comments like "r u kddng me". Come on, people, written language is one of the greatest things we're capable of, and you treat it like an outhouse. Then there are the people for whom everything devolves into an exercise in ideology - you're reading a story about paleontology, and some yahoo diverts it into a name-calling exercise in politics. And then there are the foil-hatters, the people for whom everything, literally everything, is either a conspiracy or a cover-up. And there's the contingent of people who don't know a damn thing about the subject, but still think they have the right, nay, the obligation, to utter some ridiculous nonsense, as though the First Amendment isn't just a guarantee of free speech, but an actual moral imperative to exercise it.
It drives me up the wall.
But the ones that really annoy me are the ones who poop on my magazines. Let me explain. Once I was lying in bed reading an issue of a magazine. It happened to be Sky & Telescope, but the name doesn't matter. Being tired, I laid the magazine on the floor and went to sleep. During the night, my dog came along and pooped on my magazine. I know it wasn't malicious - she probably figured she'd get in less trouble if she pooped on something disposable instead of on the carpet - but still, it was hard to not imagine that she was saying "Stop reading that stupid magazine and pay attention to ME!"
Internet comments abound with this sort of thing, people who metaphorically poop on your magazine because they don't think they're getting enough attention. A good example are the NASA-bashers. These guys go to the trouble of reading NASA news stories or feeds, and then post long, often moronic comments expressing their black hatred of NASA and everything it stands for. They're just pooping on our magazines - hating whatever they read simply so they can hear their own voices and get a little attention. NASA is certainly not above criticism, but simply crapping on the magazine because you're unhappy with life doesn't count as criticism.
Some people are idiots, and they can't help that. Some people are apparently genetically predisposed to like conspiracy theories, and they can't help that. Some people just can't spell or write a coherent sentence, in the same way that I just can't pole-vault - it just isn't in my makeup. I can understand all that, up to a point. But when some idiot intentionally craps on my magazine because he's unhappy with his life and wants attention, that bugs me.
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