The New York Times gets a lot of comments. The publication receives around 9,000 comments per day, with over 60,000 unique contributors per month. That adds up to approximately two million comment recommendations each month! This is a particularly large load consider the Times employs moderators to sift through the comments and decide which are appropriate to post. Further, the New York Times website only opens a number of stories to comments, making these figures even more impressive. Now that the year is coming to a close, the publication decided to compile what they believe to be the five best comments of the last few years. If these reader responses can be analyzed as a whole, they point to a deeply divided country with countless answers on how to solve the many problems we face today.
Responding to the quote from South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, which stated it was impossible to understand the motives of someone like Dylann Roof, who entered a historically black church in Charleston and killing nice attendees a commenter gave with a few hypotheses of his own as to why someone would commit such an atrocious act. According to The New York Times, he wrote, "Hysterical, paranoid gun culture enabled by states trying to outdo each other with permissiveness. Hysterical, hate-mongering right-wing TV 'news,' talk show hosts, web sites. Foaming-at-the-mouth incitements to racism. Continued un- and underemployment."
Other readers took the opportunity to criticize President Barack Obama for his failures of leadership in the run-up to the 2012 election. The reader opined, "The president has suffered a disastrous failure of imagination. His only consideration has been how best to position himself for the 2012 election. Forget for a moment that it is all too likely that the adverse economic consequences of his deal will complicate his reelection bid considerably, he has failed to recognize that his abject surrender has consequences for American government and American life that will be far more profound and more long lasting than whichever individual gets elevated to the White House next year. This is a shameful day to be a Democrat and a shameful day to be an American."
