by Tom Tomorrow. I’m sure I’ve posted this before somewhere, but it is high time I posted it again. Some people need to read it.
Graydon Carter’s Letter from the Editor was particularly good in this month’s Vanity Fair. In it, he said this:
“We have a president who continues to argue the
fine points of what is, or is not, torture. (Remember those balmy, simpler days of our youth when we had a president who quibbled over what is, or is not, sex?). And on this, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, perhaps it’s time to review the administration’s assertion that that was the day the world changed. It really wasn’t; 9/12 was. That was the day the neocons in the White House began using this devastating attack on American soil to further their own dreams of taking over Iraq. That was the day the world began its downward spiral. That was the day the administration began plotting to remove a dictator over there and to create one here.”
Boingboing reports on the self-censorship that the NYT has engaged in and why:
NYT ad tech blocks UK web visitors from terror plot article
The NYT website is using geo-targeting ad technology to block UK visitors from accessing a news article about the investigation surrounding the alleged UK airline terror plot. The technological self-censorship is an attempt to comply with UK law. The Times’ Tom Zeller explains how the block works and why it’s in place here. Snip from MSNBC article:“We had clear legal advice that publication in the U.K. might run afoul of their law,” Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said Tuesday. “It’s a country that doesn’t have the First Amendment, but it does have the free press. We felt we should respect their country’s law.”Visitors who click on a link to the article, published Monday, instead got a notice explaining that British law “prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.” The blocked article reveals evidence authorities have in the alleged plot to use liquid explosives to down U.S. airliners over the Atlantic.
Link to MSNBC coverage, here’s an item on Foreign Policy blog, Link to Guardian UK coverage. Here’s what web visitors identified as UK-based will see:
“On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.”
And, of course, a visitor to the raincoaster blog will see instead the article itself, after the jump. Continue reading
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