On Language, Politics and Blogs : A week after THE WEEK

Liza Sabater

Two interesting things happened at last week's panel on censorship that had me pondering the importance of these events:

Take a paycheck, lose your freedom of speech
At one point, Monica Crowley, a Republican wonkette, complained about how the lack of uniform standards was affecting her choice of words on her radio show. The following are from Jeff Jarvis' notes, The Week on Indecency, at Buzzmachine.

Monica Crowley complains about the lack of uniform standards. She used to be for the rules until she got her own radio show. "Everything is so subjective." She stopped herself from saying "bitch" yesterday.

During this exchange, John Gibson did his best to make her agree with him that banning the 7 deadly words would be "good for America". This is where it got interesting. The woman wavered. Sensing ambivalence Maher moved in to counter Gibson with a "would it be better to restrict or not restrict at all". To which Ms Crowley wavered even more. And then it happened --the Aha! moment. Ms. Crowley took a stand, albeit a wobbly one, and sided with Maher, agreeing that, indeed, no restrictions at all were better.

That's when Maher quipped :

Maher: "What she's saying is that the definition of a liberal is a conservative who's just been censored, if I may paraphrase that."

This particular exchange made me think that, after all was said and done, the fact that nobody talked about Internet media (ie: blogs) as alternatives forums for banned speech, it made blogging the elephant in the room. What I got from this forum was a lot of frustration from these famous people. They're getting paid for doing what a lot of bloggers do for free on a daily basis : Take a look at what's happening around the world and heave comments into the world, hoping to get someone's attention. The difference though is that there is virtually no censorship on the web. I say virtually because, of course, a "cease and desist" letter from a big company to your web host can shut down your site in a second. But blogging is a lot like stand up comedy : Anything goes in this format. So it is flexible and mutable and all the more slippery when you try to rope it in and control it.

Read the whole thing at c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: On Language, Politics and Blogs : A week after THE WEEK by yours truly. It is a really, really long post but I guarantee you'll at least be stricken by a WTF look on your face. Boring will be not.