Callous Washingtonians “Laughing” at Novak’s Death (UPDATED)

NBC Washington has a nifty feature on their website that allows readers to respond to stories by voting on how they feel about them, a la Buzzfeed. Users can say a story makes them bored, furious, intrigued, laughing, sad, or thrilled, and the site will tally up their responses. Occasionally, the ratings make for an interesting barometer: apparently, 44% bored of the site’s readers are bored that Demi Lovato’s mom used to be a cheerleader, and 77% are furious about Governor Tim Kaine’s plans to slash Virginia’s budget.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to enable the feature for obituaries. As of this posting, 75% of readers are “laughing,” and 12% are “thrilled,” about Robert Novak’s death. By contrast, recently departed 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt’s death got a “100% sad” rating.

(UPDATE: IT APPEARS NBC WASHINGTON HAS DELETED THE OFFENDING PAGE, AND WITH IT NOVAK’S OBITUARY. THEY’VE ALSO DISABLED RESPONSE VOTING ON HEWITT’S OBITUARY)

Online polls like these should always be taken with a grain of salt: there’s a good chance that a minority of anti-Novak readers jerry-rigged the poll, either by manually voting a lot or by hacking it. And trashing anyone this shortly after their death, even if you disagreed with them in life, is always poor form.

But this goes to show that in D.C., political arguments go beyond the grave, however rudely:

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