Hypocrites.

Hypocrites.

First of all, the one word was in response to a question: what is the most unusual thing you've ever eaten? As others have pointed out, the response that was typed was obviou given such a silly question.

In addition the St. Louis Today web site is notorious for its being technically challenged. It's not usual for a comment not to go through the first time, so you re-submit. The person's first comment was deleted immediately, the second a couple of minutes later. Rather than assume the person was being belligerent, the site should have assumed that the person resubmitted either by accident, or thinking something happened with the first submittal.

Another reason many of us who read the site are angry is that the site has actively defended comments that are racist, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic. Blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, and bigoted. Yet, here they pursued a comment that was, at worst, mildly vulgar, and even understandable considering the question.

Even then, the site could have deleted the comment a second time (you know how easy this is with WordPress). And blocked this specific poster. Or added the word to the WordPress blacklist. Or done any number of things.

What the site did, was violate its own privacy policy, and then Greenbaum bragged about it after the effect.

The only lesson learned from this event is you can't trust the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You certainly can't trust Greenbaum.

“We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.”

The racist, sexist and homophobic comments are so vile and so commonly ignored by Greenbaum that there's actually a site – http://stltomorrow.org/ – and facebook group detailing the situation – http://www.facebook.com/pages/STLtomorrow/20066…

Long gone are the days when journalists went to jail because they would not give up a name, and yet, here is someone, a 'director' no less, calling up and offering enough info to identify someone who lost their job over nonsense. And then he gloated about it. Repeatedly. Both in responding to comments and in a blog post. Also, that 'apology' is not an apology, but a further justification.

By the way, this is two separate issues: 1. what Greenbaum did and has continued to do, and 2. what the school did. Also, we don't really know if the person really did resign or was fired, and we all know that some people are often given the choice to resign rather than be fired. We only have Greenbaum's sketchy word that the person resigned voluntarily.

Back on September 3, 2009, Greebaum posted this:

6 reasons we’re lazy about story comments
http://www.igreenbaum.com/2009/09/6-reasons-wer…

And apparently, he's not getting much support from media pros in his area (registration required)

STL Media Message Board
http://stlmedia.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=p…

We all make mistakes, but Greenbaum seems not willing to admit his, let alone learn from them. I had to chuckle at one comment which suggested that he retake whatever test he took to get his 'Director of Social Media' job, and speculated that perhaps he got it because he had the most Facebook friends. Seriously though, apparently Greenbaum has near three decades of experience as a reporter. He should have know better, and he should have done better.