The seriousness of the situation has been underlined by two sobering pieces of comment this week by Lord Rees-Mogg and Brigadier Allan Mallinson.
Our first bloggers were on within the first hour of the news breaking and we had five pieces of comment on events there before the paper's comment pages went to press that night.
It might be an incisive piece of comment, a leader article, an interview, an obituary, a film or theatre review or a sports story.
A couple of pieces on Comment is free over recent weeks have suggested that the National Union of Students no longer represents the views and wishes of students, and that NUS has been inactive since calling what is still the largest student demonstration for a generation.
But then he started dating actor Meghan Markle, and the Daily Mail ran something about her being "(almost) straight outta Compton", among other thinly veiled pieces of racialised comment.
Far easier to bolt together a few pieces of trivial comment from political pundits and move on.Ironically, the Times falls into the balance trap in its very own article.
Both of these pieces trail dozens of comments bashing Saltz and calling him "witless," asking if his earnest opinions are satire, one starting with a flabbergasted, "W-u-u-u-t!" The arguments that he's had to defend reinforce his own admission of fallibility.
Complaints about our journalism are forwarded to the author of the piece for comments before corrections or clarifications are published, and the attention of section heads and production editors is drawn to our errors.
Unfortunately, this is not so, and reading Ms. Miller's piece reminded me of comments I have heard around the county as well.
Not surprisingly, the piece generated plenty of comments from readers; perhaps more surprisingly, the thing that many of them picked up on was the line in which the doyen of Eng lit, and presumed defender of the canon, wrote: "Those words... by Shakur, Ice Cube, and Snoop Dogg can legitimately take their place in what we regard as poetry, not music".
