Over at Mustard Street, Rich Tyson has some screenshots of redacted D&C comments showing the inability of D&C management to deal effectively with criticism, as well as their naïveté about the Internet.

To make a long story short, Rich added a comment to a story about property tax scofflaws that pointed out that Jim Lawrence, the D&C editorial page editor, also had a property tax judgment against him. Lawrence reacted by huffing and puffing about a personal attack. Then, D&C editor Karen Magnusen (who has a track record of being touchy) got into the comments and defended Lawrence, as well as announcing her intent have the comments stricken, which they were (today, the story has no comments at all).

The smart move for Lawrence would have been to calmly tell readers that his $1,500 obligation was satisfied long ago, and to point out that there’s a hell of a difference between one small oversight and the multi-million-dollar scofflaw behavior described in the story. Magnusen’s smart move would have been to back Lawrence, and to defend her paper’s credibility by pointing out that Lawrence had nothing to do with the story, since it was news and not an editorial.

Instead, we have another demonstration of the D&C’s mistaken belief that they can flush Internet unpleasantness down a memory hole.