Who knew that a feature I lauded two weeks ago would become such a headache for The Daily a week later? In my last column, I mentioned that the new online anonymous commenting element of The Daily was a great development because it provided a forum for discussion about stories and campus issues, without moderation or control by editors or inhibition stemming from poster reluctance to use one’s name.

This new feature allows both for uncensored criticism or approval of Daily articles and for open and immediate dialogue. Two key results emerge from this. In the former instance, the public serves as editors for The Daily by refining or verifying the accuracy of stories and offering insight and advice regarding reader concerns. In the latter instance, The Daily enters the fray of interactive journalism and leaves behind the old-fashioned, one-way communication that has characterized journalism up until very recently.

Part of being on the cutting-edge, however, involves trial and error. The Daily experiences the glitches that occur as the media test this new medium, alongside newspapers such as The Washington Post and The San Jose Mercury News — while other papers, such as The New York Times, have so far waited and watched from the sidelines.

One such hiccup arose last week when readers responded to a letter to the editor by posting comments about the writer that roughly ranged from uncivil to vicious and crude. It is one thing to attack The Daily and its articles in a public forum and another to personally attack a student, especially one not on The Daily’s staff and who merely wrote a letter to the editor.

By and large, posters on The Daily’s Web site have expressed their opinions intelligently, passionately and civilly. But this instance showed just how much the anonymity of online posting can be abused.

As the system currently works, a poster must supply a name (or title or phrase) beneath which the comment will appear. He or she must also supply an email address, but this address is never publicly displayed. The comment then appears on the page, with no filtration or censorship or editorial oversight. While editors do monitor the Web site, The Daily has not yet hired a Web editor whose sole job would be to supervise the online content and potentially act as a screen.

Whether a screen would even be desirable, however, is a question over which journalists disagree. Some argue that since a journalist’s job is to make judgments, he must do so regardless of the forum for communication and that he should not lower his standards for online content. Others argue that the days of controlled conversation are over and that a journalist’s job should be to enable and foster multi-way communication, not to mimic a letters to the editor section online by hand-selecting comments and editing them for accuracy and merit.

Regardless, The Daily clearly must implement some sort of mechanism to address the power that accompanies the ability to post anonymously. Taking potshots at writers without adding anything credible or worthwhile to the discussion is unacceptable. Just as clear, I think, is the value of preserving the anonymity feature. It encourages people to express themselves assertively and without worrying about their comments showing up on a Google search by a potential employer. Further, this aspect is standard for online newspaper commenting.

Fortunately, The Daily plans to introduce one of two remedies by the end of next week. Hopefully, a flagging system will emerge through which anyone reading online can mark a comment as offensive. Editors will then review the comment and remove it if they agree that it should not be online. Less ideally, the staff will apply a delay to the comment feature, giving the editors a chance to read a poster’s remarks and ensure they are not offensive before putting them online.

Either way, the editors should create and make known a policy of what constitutes an offensive comment. It may often be a subjective determination but objective criteria should be established. They need to be able to justify the comments that they allow on the Web site, and readers should know the rationale behind these decisions so that they can make their own judgments about what to try to post.

Admittedly, The Daily should have foreseen the likelihood of the Web comments feature getting out of control and being used for personal attacks. Strapped for resources and trying to adjust to a Web site that was completely overhauled this summer, however, the staff merits some understanding. And as soon as the editors realized how vitriolic the comments had become, they did a good job of damage control, considering their technological and staff limitations, by deleting offensive posts and posting a warning on the page that comments had gotten out of line. It also is simply a byproduct of technology that we are all now much more susceptible to broadly based public attack — but that doesn’t excuse such attacks, and The Daily must do what it can to discourage them. Rest assured that it intends to.

Finally, to follow up on the issue of Israeli/Palestinian coverage that I addressed in my last column, there have been more complaints that The Daily’s coverage perhaps reflects a pro-Palestinian bias. Yesterday’s article, “Fighting racism in Israel,” on a speaker event expressing views critical of Israel’s treatment of Arabs within its borders, failed to cover any of the audience’s perspective or to treat any point of view that was not that of the speaker. This is poor reporting, but hardly indicative of bias on a large scale. The Daily also failed to cover an event that was pro-Israel that fell on Election Day, but all of its resources were devoted to election coverage that night. This omission was neither an oversight nor a conscious choice, but merely reflected office realities. Additionally, repeated emails to Hillel from the News Department requesting information about upcoming events have gone unanswered. Nonetheless, by the end of the year the coverage should balance out, as it typically does. It may seem lopsided now, but that is certainly not intentional, and it will change.

Whitney Sado is a first-year law student. As public editor of The Daily, she writes biweekly columns assessing The Daily?s performance. Though she speaks for the reader, her opinions are her own. She can be reached at wsado@stanford.edu.