News-Record.com

Actually, I can answer the first part: Thane Peterson is a contributing editor at Business Week Online, and he's concerned about civility:

We shouldn't confuse negativity, which is often justified and informative, with incivility, which isn't.

INSULT TV. A few weeks ago, Zell Miller, the 72-year-old Democratic senator from Georgia who is supporting President Bush, felt MSNBC-TV's Chris Matthews was peppering him with harsh questions and cutting short his answers. Miller become so frustrated he told Matthews he wished we lived in the day when he could challenge the hyperaggressive TV host to a duel. Shades of Alexander Hamilton. ...

While many heaped scorn on Miller for his quaint nod to politics past, I actually applaud him in this instance -- even though I don't support his politics and don't condone his vitriolic attacks on Kerry at the GOP convention. Miller is to be congratulated for not impugning Matthews' motives or calling him names, as many politicians would have done.

Uh, no, Thane: Miller is to be mocked and lambasted for reacting in this way to a pretty tame bit of questioning of a United States senator by a TV celebrity masquerading as a journalist. He is not to be praised for expressing a wish to kill another human being in cold blood because that person dared to question him about his behavior.

It's important to remind people -- strongly if necessary -- that their actions have crossed the line. I support [New York Times ombudsman Daniel] Okrent, who recently wrote a column naming -- and condemning as a "coward" -- a San Francisco blogger who ended a note to a New York Times reporter with these words: "I hope your kid gets his head blown off in a Republican war."

The guy in San Francisco sends a reporter an abusive but private e-mail, and Okrent holds him up to public ridicule in front of an audience of millions on the Web site of The New York Times, complete with the guy's e-mail address, as a way to "remind" him that his e-mail "has crossed the line"? I'm sure that felt quite cathartic. But it also was bullying, plain and simple, and unworthy of The New York Times. (Okrent's defense, as quoted by Peterson: "... I thought about it, and I decided that someone who goes out at night and paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue doesn't want it written about either." Ah, so a private communication expressing difference, however rudely, is equivalent to public desecration of property with an underlying message of religious bigotry. Ooooooh-kay.)

I don't condone uncivil discourse, the headline on this post to the contrary. But sometimes "uncivil" is in the eye of the beholder, and in any event, despite what Peterson thinks, even greater incivility, or worse, is not the solution.