Paul Dee dies. ESPN moderator goes nuts.

Paul Dee, the former athletic director of Miami, just passed away.  He was scheduled to give his deposition in the Todd McNair case, but he may have been too sick to travel to the trial's venue to provide his testimony.

With his death, some answers may never be found.  And let's be honest here...many hoped that Todd McNair's lawsuit would act as retribution against the NCAA's COI under Paul Dee (assuredly one of the 50 Does listed in the lawsuit was Paul Dee).  Without belaboring the case, I'll just note that everyone - not just Trojans - have worn down Paul Dee's substitute name, Hypocrite.

So you can imagine there was a lot of people wanting to vent their displeasure on ESPN's boards -- hardly anything new.  If you've seen the ESPN boards, any controversial person / action generates thousands of responses within a few hours, with all sorts of name-calling and offensive adjectives.

But the ESPN moderator, for whatever reason went off the deep end and deleted comments seconds after being posted, and booted people from the boards.  Six hours after the news broke, there remains just 26 comments -- an improbability.

The ESPN moderator was so offended, he or she began deleting any comment outside of hosannas of Paul Dee -- see image below to see the extent which the mod goes.  In addition, the moderator booted people off, and deleted all of their comments from the entire ESPN site.

This goes beyond political correctness and illustrates two problems: (1) moderators are allowed to use biased judgment at ESPN to eliminate voices that he or she disagrees with; (2) but if they aren't supposed to use bias in their jobs as moderators, then ESPN has no process to monitor out of control employees.

The ESPN mod deleted cannonballjamaal's second comment.

And the ESPN mod didn't like this one from cannonballjamaal, either.

And then cannonballjamaal was booted altogether.

I keep referencing Bill Safire's old words, but at the risk of being a broken record, he warned us of the dangers of Media Gigantism.

This is the future of America.

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Update: 9 hours after the story was first posted, the mod was either been reprimanded (following complaints) or was replaced.  A close look at the time stamps of posts will note that changes resulted in a quick succession of new posts, especially in the morning hours, Monday.