Here at Boulder Weekly, we welcome robust discussion of our

stories. We hope that whenever we tackle an issue in an article, those with

opinions from all sides of the political spectrum can come to the comments

section of our website and find a robust and respectful discussion.

We are so

open-minded that we even welcome comments from paid employees of some of the

people we write about. A reader, James, engaged in a back-and-forth with some

pro-fracking commenters on a recent Boulder

Weekly column written by

Paul Danish. He then wrote a comment challenging us to do some “investigative

journalism” on the identities of his debate opponents, since he suspected they

were on the payroll of the oil and gas industry.

Well, we looked

into it. And James just might be onto something. We entered IP addresses of

some pro-fracking commenters on our website into a WHOIS database and were able

to track two commenters to two separate IP addresses registered to Noble Energy

and one commenter to an IP address registered to Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.



Of course,

there’s nothing wrong with oil and gas employees expressing their pro-fracking

opinions on our website. Still, it’s pretty

interesting to note that the majority of pro-fracking comments on one article

on our website came from two major oil and gas companies.

Online comment

boards and discussion groups are increasingly becoming targets for PR firms,

corporations and possibly even the government.



Can we add oil

and gas companies to the list? Perhaps. We’ll keep an eye on it.