Internet Comments, Summarized

Damn: Two highway police officers shot in North Philadelphia near Broad and Diamond. One is in critical condition; the gunman is dead.

Yeah. So that’s not fun. But there’s a lesson here as well: Let’s take a look at the first three comments on the Action News story:

This is pretty much the only three kinds of comments on news stories nowadays: Not-so-subtly racist ones (comment 1), oddly naive responses to previous racist ones (comment 2) and absolute nonsensical ones complaining that soap operas — in this case, One Life to Live and/or All My Children — were pre-empted for a few minutes (comment 3).

Reader Joe writes: “The article says it happened at 1:45, so the story probably went up around 2. The first comment is at 2:06. I think commenter 3 was watching TV and his program was interrupted — so he went online with the specific intention of complaining about the show being bumped.” He also notes that commenter 3 refers to a double-police shooting as a “slow news day.” Man, who needs to be shot to impress that person? “How dare they interrupt Days of Our Lives to tell me the Pope was shot!”

Update: One of the officers has died.

2 officers shot in North Philadelphia [6 ABC]