Say around 150 years ago, this sort of article might have appeared in some prestigious newspaper of record. Without the technology to link rebuttals or comments

Say around 150 years ago, this sort of article might have appeared in some prestigious newspaper of record. Without the technology to link rebuttals or comments to it, maybe 30+ years later when the history books of that original time period were being written and most of the influential people alive during that time period were gone, it would be trivially easy for some historian to interpret a really bad take like this as gospel, get it in front of school-children, and have it taught as truth. They could be well-intentioned, but still easily get things grossly wrong without the ability to see rebuttals to it. Opinions are always fair to have: everybody has them, and even bad ones. But you have to wonder how much of history is really just garbage takes like this. This to me is a large argument in favor of more sites having blog comments and not censoring opinions, even if 99% of the takes are usually garbage. When the journalists and historians of the future are writing about this time period, it would be horrific if the only sources available were equally garbage takes like this with no commentary available in rebuttal.