The LA Times has an article on Weintraub's muzzling:
For more than a century, California has been one of American democracy's most dynamic electoral proving grounds. Now, the influential role of Internet-based commentators in the current recall campaign also has turned the state into a fascinating laboratory of political journalism.
Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals' 9th Circuit put California's first gubernatorial recall election back on track. But a controversy raging over Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub's widely admired blog raises the question of whether the simultaneous experiment in campaign reporting is being aborted or merely fine-tuned?
Much of the story is already well-blogged. The Times' conclusion?
"An edited blog is a contradiction in terms," said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "It's a characteristic of the Internet in general that forms like the blog emerge with great exuberance and edgy promise and then the overseers move in. That's a pity. We need frontiers of plain-speaking, even it's politically incorrect. I understand why the Bee did what it did, but it leads to a restraint on free-thinking, which is lamentable."
There is much to be learned here. It's a shame the Sacramento Bee's editors did not allow this important experiment to reach its ultimate conclusion so that the rest of us could reach ours.Posted by Kevin Murphy at September 24, 2003 09:40 AM | TrackBack