Lol! He would not qualify. You can see from the original article how well he understood the posts he was given to look at! And then HE has the effrontery to suggest paid moderators etc.
His idea is really impractical. You really would have to preview each post which would slow the forum to a crawl. Posts on different threads appear as they are posted all mixed together in a stream as anyone can see in the latest messages page.
All that a Moderator could pick out would be obvious profanity, racial slurs or threats. O'Reilly couldn't do it as we see from his comments relative to the actual posts the producer sent Kristinn.
The stream of posts jumping from thread to thread and the shear volume and 24/7 nature of Free Republic would keep a Moderator from following the context of every post to control bad content. What is an inappropriate post in one context is OK in another and that could only be evaluated on a thread by thread basis. There are thousands of threads every day at Free Republic. It is impossible to sit on each thread with an attainable staff level. Some of those threads have thousands of posts and can go on for days.
Also, posters usually do not read every post on a thread. They simply would not see a bad post to report it and many have an aversion to being a "tattle tale" anyway.
Anyone who ever Moderated a forum would instantly know O'Reilly's suggestion is Nitwittery.
Indeed, and O'Reilly has show he can certainly be a nitwit by trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
The absolutely only way to do what O’Reilly suggests is as you say, preview every post. That would effectively take away one of the things that makes FR great, which is the flow of conversation that is so fast as to make it almost like a chat room, a free flowing conversation that gives birth to great ideas and a confluence of minds which gives us great moments like Rathergate.
His suggestion that paid moderators would somehow do a better job of pulling posts that cross the line than volunteers really makes no sense. It’s simply an issue of volume and paid or volunteer there simply wouldn’t be the manpower to watch every post.
Besides, I think Mr. O’Reilly should realize the internet is not static. There’s no break for commercial or edit the tape. A thinking person should understand a site as big as FR, every now and then there’s going to be something unacceptable posted and every now and then a post like that will slip through.
How anyone can compare sites like Kos or DU, where entire threads are devoted to hateful comments, to a site like FR, where the vast majority of the time the posts are well within the bounds of polite conversation.
O’Reilly also left out the fact than even when a post doesn’t go so far as to need to be pulled, the offending poster is often berated by other posters for being hateful or unChristian.