Blurring the lines: ESPN Conversation beta

I read the ESPN Ombudsmen whenever he or she posts (once a month nowadays) and, while I'll reserve my criticism of ESPN's Le Anne Schreiber for another day, I've never sent more than a short comment to him or her about anything I see on television. What I've often thought about sending in a comment about, though, deals not only with ESPN articles, but also AOL news items as well: the way reader comments are treated as a part of the news articles. While I'm not one of those people, like the Ombudsmen, that believes no news personalities should be able to endorse products (for one, I have no qualms about more Suzy Kolber on the air, and another, as long as the reporter doesn't have endorsement commercials running during his or her own broadcasts, there's no appearance of reporting; but I digress), I do feel like all news organizations run the risk of morphing user feedback into news. As far as online news articles, AOL's comment section appears directly below the article, and ESPN's similarly appears right below the information itself, separated by, if anything, a few crummy advertisements. But, while AOL only shows five comments on the front page (I assume they are the first five comments), ESPN employs moderators who get to post a few comments on the front page. While AOL's policy often results in vehemently racist or offensive messages (I have even reported some of the comments, and we all know my feelings about "snitching"), ESPN's method seems more prone to abuse, because the moderators have the ability to contribute in a sense to the article by adding opinion to the front page. In the screen shot I've posted alongside this, for example, there's a comment about ASU's blowout loss to Texas indicating a general PAC-10 weakness, drawing from an article by Bruce Feldman. While I certainly understand how an individual can draw such an idea from the article--which discusses, among other pieces, how Texas tore ASU apart despite an idiotic maneuver by a Longhorn employee--the article certainly doesn't demand such an deduction as "the PAC-10 conference is weak." That sort of suggestion is purely the creation of an individual reader, not Feldman himself in the article. Yet, there such a statement appears on the front page, right after Feldman's short bio, making it seem as though such commentary were part of the article. Indeed, by doing so, the moderators are doing more than just weeding out inappropriate responses because they are deciding what comments and conclusions are "worthy" of appearing alongside the article. AOL's method doesn't work (I could post one of the comments I reported, but I don't wish to be associated with that sort of awfulness even here) because anything can appear right there, but ESPN's method presents just as many moral dilemmas. Thankfully, I have a solution for ALL news organizations: simply make sure that each and every user comment appears ONLY on a separate forum page, and that no user comments appear alongside articles. This way, there is a clear distinction made between the news and the article its author has written and what Joe America has to say about that article or the topics discussed within it. By doing this, organizations like ESPN and AOL can offer users an excellent forum, and never worry about having negative or influencing comments from purporting themselves as anything more than non-journalistic commentary.