Yes, this would be to conflate the tiny community of bloggers who go on about “moonbats” and “fisking” with “the planet”.

> It’s an assemblage of the least trusted media corporations
> on the planet.

Sorry Penny you are way out of order with that comment. The BBC is one of the most trusted news sources in the world. Many Americans turn to the Beeb too.

“Transparency” that sounds good. So why is the al Jazeera memo subject to the Official Secrets Act? why is there not the same energy to get this published that there is to get the Davos tape?

Bertrand Pecquerie surely has a good point in saying that the policy to target journalists is where the story should be, not whether someone has made a statement outside what US media consider normal.

I have put similar points in stories for OhmyNews.

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=3&no=289490&rel_no=1

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=4&no=289490&rel_no=2

Will

I hope we get to more inspiring discussions today!

Sorry I missed you this time round, Jeff. Next time =)

Hopefully the “lemmings” here will challenge *this* egregious statement…

I couldn’t give a flying whether particular contributors are Americans, non-Americans, pro-Americans or anti-American. It’s got nothing to do with what’s happening in 99% of the world, 99% of the time. And that’s whether you’re a journalist, a blogger or just a human being who’s fed up of every single thing being politically hijacked by one moronic partisanista or another.

It’s an assemblage of the least trusted media corporations on the planet.

Who cares what that crowd thinks, for God’s sake. Their unrelenting anti-American biased reporting disqualifies them for intelligent considerations of trust. And throwing in as cheesecake some lefty actor, whose career has long been over, as guest speaker doesn’t bode well for restoring trust either.

“For 100 years after the Civil War,” he says, “it was perfectly acceptalbe in America to pull over to the side of the road and kill any black person you happened to see.”

Message to Dreyfus: that hyperbole is crap and totally unsupported by facts.

Bet none of the journalism lemmings in the room challenged his egregious statement which is why bloggers will eventually trounce these fools as the years roll by.

I would be very careful indeed surrounded by all of those “digital assassins“; a phrase invented by someone that has a very hip collection of music on their iPod. Probably.

You are making an erroneous presumption that, ipso facto, bloggers don’t have journalism training and, thus, the two categories are mutually exclusive.

I attended seminars for years at the Columbia U J-School as a student journalist. In my generation most females were confined to the pink collar section of the newspaper: the Society page and then maybe some Entertainment.

That barrier may be gone now to some degree, but you are trying to erect it all over again.

You are still trying to preserve Journalism as a “Just-Us Club.” Now, with the Internet, you will not be able to continue to accomplish this.

I say this mainly to bear witness for all the women (and diverse minorities) who have been locked out of practicing Journalism by the Mainstream Media.

I heard that the BBC was offering UK bloggers £50 to attend as so few had signed up for this.

You’re there Jeff, how genuine does this event feel?

“Thompson says that ‘media is going to be configured and shaped by individuals and communities around them, by them’ — no longer by the big media. Amen.

“He is saying that the BBC must take its content and let and help people create with it. Amen, again. But, of course, they also need to enable those people to create and promote and support them. We’re all in this together.”

Sulzburger wants the NY Times to be a convenor. In the end, so long as “journalism” is something anyone can do and is no longer a profession, time will dissipate the value of content that the BBC or NYT put into the hands of the people, since that content will be supplanted by creations from the blogrolls. At which time BBC = MySpace. I’m trying to convince myself that’s not the real end-game, but I keep ending up there. Troubling.