http://hamptons.plumtv.com/videos/journalists_journey

As to old vs. new media, I know how hard it is to see new things through old eyes and to give up a feeling of expertise to a feeling of fumbling in the dark. I do think “old” media may be trying to adjust without losing their jobs. That’s not such a crime, and there is a place for both delivery methods. Personally, I find the Internet sources from old media pretty good and useful. I find some of the newer entrants a little light on fact checking and sourcing. My own new-media editor relies way too much on Wikipedia for links, and it makes me cringe to see that.

Do you know what I consider harassment? Having secret surveillance taking place (which, of course, the Republican Congress has now made legal after the fact–sheep). I don’t want to worry about my conversations being surveilled. That’s harassment to me.

If you don’t think that preventing a possibly dissenting voice from teaching American college students isn’t censorship, then I need your definition.

My source for Masri is the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/03/AR2005120301476.html

Oh and hey, Penny, what’s not working for me? That you refuse to believe anything outside your own point of reference? That’s true. That doesn’t work for me.

You know what I am a conservative about? Money. I think you shouldn’t spend money you don’t have. Another way the Bush has betrayed the conservative agenda. We had a balanced budget at least under the corporate slave, Bill Clinton. Bush is still a corporate slave, but he doesn’t know how to handle money. I guess Daddy never let him have his own checking account to find out.

Tariq Ramadan, whose works I’m very certain you have never read (and I’m a Muslim who is pretty much offended at his stuff) is denied a Visa. And that equals censorship? I hope you know that hundreds of thousands of US Visa applications are denied without explanation year after year in every single part of the world and have been for decades. Is each and every one of them a case of censorship?

As for Khaled Masri; I need to see a source for your information. And even from what little you wrote, it is not clear that anything wrong has been done. Where was Masri captured? Was it in Afghanistan? Was it in Iraq? The story also obviously came from anonymous sources - is the information they are giving to whoever it is they are giving it to, complete?

Valerie Plame [HARASSED.]

Heh heh heh …

You must have been in a coma for the past few weeks. Armitage’s revelation as the leak has completely collapsed that Left-wing fantasy. Heck, even the Leftist Washington Post editorial page has had to concede that Joe Wilson is an incorrigible farcical liar.

Contrary to your version of reality, Valerie Plame was not harassed.

In fact, she became the most famous CIA employee in history, has got a multi-million dollar book deal and a major cause celebre for the Left.

PS: I noticed that you have not been able to point out any Americans who have been shouted down, imprisoned or harassed by the Bush Administration?

Note that if the person is still writing, talking on TV or making documentaries, that should be enough evidence that he has not been censored. If the person you are going to name as imprisoned is John Walker Lindh, then you’re going to have to prove that he was not picked up in Afghanistan but was simply arrested off the street in San Francisco. If you are going to claim someone was harassed, please make sure that the person you are citing is not simply whining because he called the President a mass murderer and somebody else called him an idiot, i.e. he encountered dissenting arguments.

Try again, Marilyn. Try harder.

Marylin, it’s not working for you.

Ambassador Daniel R. Coats … informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
[IMPRISONED.]

Valerie Plame [HARASSED.]

When you poll a room of journalists and find that not one conservative is represented, how the hell can you continue pretending that content, the overwhelming perpetual lefty slant, isn’t a big part of journalism’s demise?

Marylin’s …” we are living in a fascist state” and Oliver’s…”conservatives do not value journalism” are typical lefties with their idiotic hyperbole and attempts at reducing dialogue to meaningless juvenile memes.

There is no war coverage. Last week, it was reported there were only 9 embedded journalists in Iraq with the military. The remaining hundred(?) assigned there, I assume are running up bar bills in their hotels. AP and Reuters have dishonored themselves with scandals involving local stringers that are disingenuous at best or terrorist sympathizers at worst.

CBS, typical hacks that they are, put vacuous Katie Couric in their anchor chair, then, dropped to last place again in three days. The public has had it with form over substance. If you were really serious about improving the content, adding balance and depth, you’d have to do an honest hand count in your newsroom.

It shouts down, imprisons, and harasses its opponents. Done.

Go ahead Marilyn. Name one person that has been shouted down, imprisoned or harassed by the Bush Administration?

I think this person is Safely Ignorable. Here’s why.

It’s all about the quotes.

If the whole thing - “war on terror” - is in quotes, that tells you nothing about the writer’s Ignorability. The phrase itself is so cliched that the quotes might just sort of pop up without any special shading of meaning.

“War” on terror is even less dispositive - they could be questioning the appropriateness of the war model, preferring a bit of good old-fashioned police work. Rightly or wrongly, but it’s a reasonable position.

War on “terror”, though - those bunny ears have a decidedly kookier valence.

1) Good god, I *hope* not! He’s a funny guy and all, but any generation that sounds (exclusively) like that has problems.

2) Which “generation” is he not the voice of, I wonder? I was born in 1979, and I don’t know that I’m happy with him being my “voice.”

Besides, isn’t he sort of on the Boomer/X cusp anyway?

… toddle off to wiki …

Yup. Born in 1962. (Which Wiki eerily refers to as a “Shadow Boomer.”)

Thanks for trying to be evenhanded, Jesme. The country wasn’t fascistic in the 80s. However, we now have a president who has been illegally wiretapping who knows how many people, and wants to suppress the information. We have a president who wants to throw the Geneva Convention to the dogs. We have a president who would like to abolish habeas corpus, who condones secret prisons, who has tried to call torture legal, who seems incapable of telling the truth about anything–all in the name of the nebulous, neverending war on “terror.” The first thing a fascist state does is create terror in its citizens. Done. It spies on its citizens. Done. It shouts down, imprisons, and harasses its opponents. Done.

It’s not enough for this administration to turn the country over to corporations, send the National Guard illegally to Iraq to become cannon fodder because they get 2 days of training a year, and then have them guard convoys of KBR/Halliburton employees and property. It continues its assault on the press by demonizing the New York Times, which has been looking pretty corporate and compliant from my point of view. When will it stop? I am absolutely certain that the dossiers you think are a figment of my imagination are alive and well. You know that more than a third of the citizens of East Germany had “a file”? It’s not farfetched to think it could happen here. Anything can happen anywhere.

When my King, I mean, Mayor Daley, whose administration is so corrupt they might have to invent a new word for it, who let more than 800 people die in a heat wave and then said it was their own fault, and who tore up the runway of an airport in the middle of the night because the FAA wouldn’t shut the place down as he wanted, says he admires G.W. Bush, I know we’re in big trouble.

Sarcasm is hardly what I’m reacting to. This is really happening.

Or is this what you mean? I noticed a distinct shift in tolerance for opposing views as early as the 80s, and found myself saying things to agree under subtle but real pressure.

So because you feel social pressure to go along with conservative opinions, America is now a fascist state? This reminds me of the Monty Python routine about gangsters Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, who ruled the London underworld with a mixture of violence and sarcasm. Only this time, there’s no violence–just the sarcasm. But for you, that’s bad enough.

No offense, Marilyn, but the fact that you find the current political climate uncongenial hardly means that you’re living in a fascist state. You’re projecting your own insecurity on the society at large, I fear. It’s an easy trap to fall into; I sometimes do myself.

Pretty Olympian standards set there.

Let’s see.

“Our country has become a much meaner and more threatening place to live, where dissent from the conservative norms that have bullied their way to power is greeted by threats.”:

Which is why, people like Cindy Sheehan have been put in jail for daring to ‘dissent from conservative norms’. Wait, that’s right she’s been the darling of the international media while sitting outside the presidents personal property shouting at him like he was Pol Pot. (Cambodia….1970’s….forget it. It’ll just confuse you)

“I noticed a distinct shift in tolerance for opposing views as early as the 80s, and found myself saying things to agree under subtle but real pressure.”:

Subtext: When Reagon came into power I actually had to SPEAK with people who didn’t agree with me! Can you imagine the audacity of having to defend your beliefs??? I mean, who DOESN’T know that abortion on demand and affirmative action are by default the right positions. I tell you, it’s chilling. VERY chilling to have to use logic and reason to support your positions.

“It may not be obvious to everyone, but it is to me, that we are living in a fascist state at the moment. “:

Because, as I said before, the government has already read your post, created a file on you, and the guys with white coats (and blue gloves on their hands for you ‘firefly’ fans) are coming to your house right now to re-educate you. You know, like Kim Jong-Il does to his people and Castro does to cubans who dare to question El Jefe’s rulings. Just like Stalin did to tens of millions of soviets and Mao did to all those people during the cultural revolution. You know, all those other FASCIST dictators of yore.

If your idiotic points weren’t so demonstrably false I would pity you more. But since you seem to think very highly of your ability to reason and ’speak truth to power’, pity usually isn’t the first thing that comes to peoples minds.

…..laughter maybe. But certainly not pity. And sadly, pity is what you really deserve.

It’s this uniformity that makes it so easy to mock mainsteam media, even while blogs are a bubbling caldron of thought diversity. The (likely apocryphal) Pauline Kael quote upon Nixon’s landslide victory — that she couldn’t believe Nixon had won, since no one she knew had voted for him — comes to mind.

So while Bernstein defends Watergate coverage with Gitlin and Wolff worries about form, Brooke Gladstone (apparently without irony) admonishes - “You can’t use media as a conduit anymore… you have to use it as a conversation.”

This – to a crowd that believes a team is a league.

(Boy, Oliver is sure bitter about having driven himself off the cliff of readable, interesting bloggers into the fever swamps of partisan scolds, isn’t he?)

Conservatives do not value journalism or the arts? They value media that “tells them what to think”? Hilarious! This is exactly the mindset that lost Dems the last election.

Here is the current explanation for why Bush remains President: Democrats, who are much, much smarter (and better looking, more artistic, and open-minded) than Republicans, lost because all of those dumb people (mostly in those confounded, backwards and illiterate flyover states) voted for Bush without thinking. This could be because they were programmed to do so by Karl Rove, but is most likely due to the fact that they are really, really dumb. And those who didn’t vote for Bush are both brilliant and cuddly by default.

What would have been true journalism is if someone–a student, perhaps–in that room had raised their hand, stood up against the tide of BS and said they were a Bush supporter (even if they weren’t). The reaction by the participants as well as the audience would have been the real story.

The reason there were no Bush voters are because conservatives do not value journalism, or in a larger sense, the arts. They value media that tells them what to think (Fox, Instapundit) rather than media that informs them and possibly doesn’t follow the way they see the world in lockstep.

No.