WASHINGTON, D.C. Aug. 28 (DPI) – Wednesday’s horrifying killings of two young television employees – during a broadcast, later trumpeted by the killer on social media – set off a hardly surprising explosion of online commentary. And well beyond the immediate sub-texts of guns, race, sexual orientation, workplace security, media coverage and the media’s and internet’s role in abetting such crimes, there was too the issue of what news sites allow on their comment boards.

For The New York Times and The Washington Post, the incident highlighted the dramatic difference in how they manage their comment boards: The former carefully filters comments, while the latter allows almost all reader posts, creating a tense and personal free-for-all, like most chat rooms on the internet today.

And the results, of course, were striking: Well filtered NYT reader comments went on about the the proliferation of guns and the role of the National Rifle Association in allowing such tragedies to occur. Note the more than 1600 reader comments linked to the initial news story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/wdbj7-virginia-journalists-shot-during-live-broadcast.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Meanwhile, a huge number of Washington Post comments focused on the media coverage and what they see as a culture of victimization – and almost no references to the NRA:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/two-roanoke-journalists-killed-on-live-television-by-angry-former-colleague/2015/08/26/8e534e0e-4c0c-11e5-902f-39e9219e574b_story.html?tid=pm_local_pop_b

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/us/vester-lee-flanagan-grievances-homicidal-explosion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news