The Charlotte Observer Censors And Suppresses ALL Comments On An Article About The 2011 UUA GA In Charlotte North Carolina

In an egregious example of blanket censorship and suppression of free speech, which includes the "memory holing" of numerous comments, The Charlotte Observer has not only "disabled" comments on an article titled 'Liberal denomination stands up for its causes' by it's religion columnist Tim Funk, but has deleted every single one of the dozens of comments that had already been posted in response to Tim Funk's "puff piece" article about the 2011 UUA GA in Charlotte NC. I do not know if any Unitarian*Universalists aka U*Us are responsible for requesting/demanding this pathetic act of censorship by The Charlotte Observer, or if it's editorial staff foolishly decided of its own accord to hide or delete ALL of the previously submitted comments, which numbered over 100, and "disable" aka suppress ALL comments that might have been submitted in response to Tim Funk's "puff piece". I had submitted several comments of my own and saved the pages that those comments were posted to but, in that this kind of egregious censorship had never occurred previously with any other mainstream U.S. publication, I did not save any of the comment pages that did not have one of my own comments on it.

Here are the comments that I submitted to Tim Funk's "puff piece -

Oh dear. . . Perhaps not.

It seems that the comments which were submitted to Tim Funk's article were not actually saved when I saved the pages. This is the first time that *that* has happened as well. In the past, when I saved an online news article that had comments attached to it, everything that was visible on the page was saved, but the files that I just tried to retrieve from my hard drive do not display the comments on the article and have a notification saying -

We were unable to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our documentation on identifier and urls.

So EVERY single comment that was posted to Tim Funk's "puff piece" has vanished into thin cyberspace, never to be seen again, unless the editorial staff of The Charlotte Observer reinstate the "memory holed" comments, assuming that *they* are able to do so. . .

For the record I have in fact contacted The Charlotte Observer and have asked them to not only reinstate the numerous "memory holed" comments but reinstate the comments function so that others may continue to comment on Tim Funk's article.

More about this disturbing example of blanket internet censorship and suppression, indeed outright "memory holing", of numerous people's comments by a mainstream American newspaper later. I guess that I will just have to more or less reconstruct the comments that I had submitted and post them here in a new Emerson Avenger blog post, but I *had* hoped to simply copy and paste what I had actually posted to The Charlotte Observer's web site.