Time to curb Internet hate speech

We stand on the precipice of history, with Barack Obama, a black man, ready to assume the presidency.

Yet, as incredible as that accomplishment is, sometimes it seems as though this country has come no farther than it was four decades ago in terms of improving race relations.

Most teenagers and people in their 20s have no consciousness of just how horrible that time really was for a lot of people.

Sure, there was Woodstock, and all that great music, and the ongoing afterglow of 1967’s Summer of Love. But it was also a time when a presidential candidate — former Alabama Gov. George Wallace — got broad support (North and South) for his racist, segregationist views every time national television covered his campaign. Wallace’s message had absolutely nothing to do with love, and everything to do with forceful, violent hatred of African Americans. Yet, his views weren’t considered to be all that radical, and he was given the same deference as all the other candidates — except for maybe anti-war favorite Eugene McCarthy, who was essentially discounted by the mainstream press, much the same way former candidate Dennis Kucinich was blown off during the latest campaign for president.

Forty years ago also saw all the hate that had been building up from the start of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1930s and ’40s erupt with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and then Bobby Kennedy, who had built much of his campaign for president around themes of equality, anti-discrimination and reconciliation.

Reactions to these two events, particularly the King killing just two months before Kennedy was gunned down, were swift and terrible, with major cities that summer erupting in flames set by people beyond being frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights progress. Later, people opposed to the war in Vietnam, as Kennedy was, took to the streets of Chicago and essentially torpedoed that year’s Democratic National Convention.

Of course, much good has happened since then: witness Obama’s incredible campaign for president. But much remains to be done, that is if the proliferation of hate speech on Web sites is any indication of how people really feel about America’s plodding but nevertheless ongoing racial diversification in politics, business and everyday life.

We know that most often technology develops faster than man’s ability to adequately control it, and that seems to be the case with mainstream newspapers that allow readers to post comments about stories on their Web sites through a contracted message service.

No one seems to be watching what’s happening on some of these sites, and that’s too bad, primarily because some of these remarks — made mostly by a handful of cowardly anonymous posters — are as vile as they are disturbing. (For more on this, please see our story on page 8.)

We’ve already quoted some of the things being said via Web sites for the Pasadena Star-News and its sisters in the MediaNews Group, which also owns the Daily News of Los Angeles, and won’t repeat them here. Suffice to say these messages — one of them openly calling for the assassination of Obama — give us enough pause to wonder just how serious all of this really is.

In our opinion — and especially now as we begin a new and more hopeful chapter in American race relations — they are extremely serious and should be treated that way by both law enforcement and the people responsible for running these sites, namely the editors and publishers of our local daily papers.

No one supports freedom of expression more than we do. But with that freedom comes responsibility, part of which includes setting some limits on exactly what people can and cannot write on a Web site open to public view.

We applaud the actions of San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group Senior Editor Frank Pine, who took down the incendiary racist comments on his paper’s site soon after learning about them from Weekly Deputy Editor Joe Piasecki.

With a new day dawning, and remnants of the past reminding us of how bad things might have been, we all need to be just as responsible as Pine was in dealing with this growing problem.