The Latino mayor of Hartford, CT has launched a gang attack on the Hartford Courant for allowing free speech on their Topix forums.

Story with media links posted on Newsnet14.

Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez’s attack on The Courant for allowing readers to post racist and hateful speech on the paper’s online comment boards raises an issue increasingly confronting newsrooms across the country as newspapers rapidly transform from primarily a print to an Internet business:

How far should newspapers go in policing that kind of speech?

On Monday, in an open letter co-signed by six Hartford public officials, Perez accused The Courant of being insensitive to minorities for not removing posts on courant.com that, he says, referred to inner-city residents as “barbarians” and described immigrants and African Americans as lacking “traditional New England standards of civility.”

The Courant’s comment boards swelled with passionate debate this month following the paper’s coverage of the May 30 hit-and-run on Park Street that left Angel Arce Torres critically injured, and the June 2 mugging of former Deputy Mayor Nicholas Carbone. The two incidents sparked broad debate about civility in Hartford in many forums...

However, the real reason for Perez' ire may be because the Courant has aggressively reported on a state corruption probe into Perez' activities as mayor. So it is possible that Perez may be playing the race card to divert attention from the investigation.

The Topix forum associated with this story is located HERE.

Another Topix forum from a related story can be found HERE.

Neither require registration; both offer great opportunities for "WN outreach".