News articles involve editorial intent, discretion, and several rounds of "filters". Comments sections largely do not, which is why they generally devolve into

News articles involve editorial intent, discretion, and several rounds of "filters". Comments sections largely do not, which is why they generally devolve into just arguments. Only with heavily-moderated communities that impose those filters (like Hacker News, or the NYTimes, as the article mentions) can you have any substantive commentary. It's easy to hitch an underrepresented and specifically suppressed view (like white nationalism, anti-semitism, sexism) into the comments section as a means of piggy-backing off the visibility of the main article. Given that some people go out of their way to ignore the actual content as a means of furthering their underrepresented message means that the comments section is being used to short-circuit the moderation loop most journalistic publications go through.