The biggest danger of treating politics as a business is that old rule about the customer always being right.

Consumers of politics — and media — are not always right, and extreme events, as we’ve seen in the news this past week in Gaza and Ukraine, are eliciting extreme views.

The perpetual question is: how do you deal with the people who are prompted by these events to share their extreme, “I’m never wrong” views with the politicians or the media? Even more vexing: what if their views are hateful or threatening?

This week on Facebook, CBC journalist Neil MacDonald, Washington correspondent and veteran of Middle East and Ottawa political coverage, conducted an interesting experiment in dealing with hateful messages.

A very angry woman in Calgary was peppering MacDonald and other CBC reporters with messages wishing for their death or kidnapping because she disagreed with CBC’s reporting on events in Gaza. She said she was sharing these wishes with “friends around the world,” hoping her wishes might turn into reality if they reached people in the Middle East.

MacDonald decided to let the rest of the world, or at least his Facebook followers, see the vicious rubbish verbatim, complete with the woman’s name and email address.

No stranger to these kinds of messages when he was reporting in the Middle East, MacDonald decided that there was something to that old saying about sunlight being the best disinfectant: Shine some light on this nastiness, and it will fade or retreat to the dark place from whence it came. At the very least, the letter-writer might get some help from friends or professionals in dealing with her anger.

Some people argued on MacDonald’s Facebook page that he should just ignore her: that he was just giving her the oxygen her extreme views craved.

So what is the best medicine for toxic commentary? Oxygen-deprivation or a dose of sunlight?

Steve Ladurantaye, head of news and government partnerships at Twitter Canada, conducts very useful sessions with political types on how to use the medium.

One of his perhaps surprising bits of advice is to “block early, block often.” Ladurantaye isn’t kidding — his view is that free expression isn’t a free-for-all: you don’t have to put up with people who are repeatedly offensive on Twitter.

“Bottom line is you don’t need to be exposed to anyone you don’t want to be,” Ladurantaye says.

You could call this the opposite of what MacDonald attempted this week — shut them down versus open it up. But the two approaches, it seems to me, are complementary; both revolving around the discipline of the virtual, community square.

In a real, in-person discussion, anyone who simply yelled insults would be shut down or ignored. This is the test I use when making the decision to block people on social media — if their remarks are the pointless, angry kind that would make me walk away from a real-life conversation, I simply turn off the noise.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t take criticism — and journalists can be notoriously thin-skinned. But when it crosses the line between criticizing what we’ve written or broadcast and insults based on who we are or where we work, that’s when it’s probably time to stop listening. Block early, block often.

Threats are a different matter altogether. When someone is trying to intimidate or scare you into silence, alerting the community, if not the authorities, seems to be the wisest course. The woman writing to MacDonald was trying to frighten the journalists — that’s a tactic that should be exposed, whether it comes from audiences or the politicians we cover. (And yes, it does happen more often than one would think in Ottawa — the old “call the boss” routine, trying to imperil people’s employment.)

Harry Selfridge, founder of the Selfridge’s department store in the U.K., is given credit for coming up with the motto about the customer always being right.

But democracy isn’t a department store and public dialogue is more than a conversation between service deliverers and recipients.

A couple of months ago, I spent an afternoon walking through Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood with NDP candidate Joe Cressy and municipal councillor Mike Layton, campaigning in the Trinity-Spadina byelection.

Along the way, Layton was encountering shop owners or other citizens venting their concerns and complaints about local affairs. I was pleasantly surprised to see that he didn’t just tell them they were right — he pushed back, politely and respectfully, when he thought their views or facts were off-base.

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It was a demonstration of the difference between simple, “retail politics” and authentic political dialogue.

Sometimes the customers — let’s call them citizens — aren’t always right. Sometimes, when they’re really wrong, the best reply is a little less oxygen or a little more sunlight.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s parliamentary bureau.

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