FC: Newspapers filter out "bad words" from email to their reporters

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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From: "William K. Dobbs" <duchamp () mindspring com>
To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan () well com>
Subject: bad words
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 00:12:13 -0500

Declan,

The discrete charm of robotic thinking:  I never imagined a newspaper
reporter would use email filtering software to root out posts with "bad
words."  Then it is revealed an entire major newspaper is using the stuff.
Why would editors and reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel allow a
contraption to make such judgments, to act as a censor?  I sure hope that
other media outlets will not go down this road.

-Bill Dobbs


X-Failed-Recipients: gpabst () onwis com
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon () smtp6 mindspring com>
To: duchamp () mindspring com
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 13:13:38 -0500

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim).

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

gpabst () onwis com
SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:
host newmail.jsinc.com [207.170.24.146]: 550 Banned text appeared in header
or body: 'fuck'


Chicago Reader [Chicago, IL]
February 7, 2002

http://www.chireader.com/hottype/index.html

HOT TYPE

By Michael Miner

[excerpt]

Make the World Go Away

If you sit at an office computer, you may have noticed that half of your
E-mail peddles XXX Web sites. Last month Don Wycliff, the Tribune's public
editor, wrote to lament this flood of spam into his office, and the
particular difficulty newspapers face in doing anything about it.

"There are technological responses to porn spam, of course -- filters and
blocking devices,"he wrote. "But any filter or blocking device involves
trading off a measure of openness for a reduction in annoyance and the other
costs that spam imposes. Newspapers, which must be as open to the public as
possible, ought to be loath to close themselves off in any way that can be
avoided."

But a few papers have decided to live with that trade-off. The other day
William Dobbs, a gay activist in New York who's a critic of hate-crimes
laws, explained his case against them in a phone call to a Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel reporter and followed up by E- mailing her some news stories. One
was a column that Alexander Cockburn had written in June 2000 for the New
York Press. Cockburn's piece began, "We're just about 31 years away from the
great Stonewall riot, which set the tone for years of defiant gay
insurgency. Stonewall was about defiance. It was a Fuck You to the forces of
repression, to the forces of the state. So where's this spirit of defiance
today?"

The Journal Sentinel bounced Dobbs's E-mail right back to him. Dobbs was
startled to read an error message that announced: "Banned text appeared in
header or body." Dobbs tried again, making it "F/K You" this time, and
Cockburn's column sailed through. Then Dobbs called me.

"We're trying to strike a balance between the functionality of the business
and free speech, and trying to protect the working environment," explains
Jim Herzfeld, the Journal Sentinel's vice president for information
technology. But the technology is "pretty crude," which is why the
occasional Alexander Cockburn essay is rejected too.

<end>




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