WASHINGTON (AP)--The Washington Post (WPO) shut down one of its blogs Thursday after the newspaper's ombudsman raised the ire of readers by writing that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to the Democrats as well as to Republicans.
At the center of a congressional bribery investigation, Abramoff gave money to Republicans while he had his clients donated to both parties, though mostly to Republicans.
In her Sunday column, ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting a wave of nasty reader postings on post.blog.
There were so many personal attacks that the newspaper's staff could not "keep the board clean, there was some pretty filthy stuff," and so the Post shut down comments on the blog, or Web log, said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com.
"We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it," Brady wrote on the newspaper's Web site. "There are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech."
