Here they come: More articles I recently found interesting. I do not agree with with every word of them but yadda, yadda, yadda…
- Press Self-Censorship by Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
- The First Casualty by Joe Conason, Salon
- Yes, But What? by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
- Why Did The Media Delay Its Florida Recount Study? by Eric Boehlert, Salon
- Courage Under Fire by Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
- Defining Terrorism by Michael Kinsley, Slate
- Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics by John Montoya, Adequacy.org
The first link above is to the weekly column of one of my favorite current political commentators, Gene Lyons. Mr. Lyons is an award-winning journalist who resides in Arkansas and, throughout the Clinton administration, he was generally out in front with predictions and commentaries, including some of the first reports of Ken Starr's goons trampling on the Civil Rights of anyone in the state they thought might be squeezed into giving damaging testimony about the President and First Lady. That no one ever caved to the pressures and said what Starr's office wanted them to say is amazing. I'm not sure that, if they'd done some of that stuff to me, I wouldn't have cratered and confessed to carrying Bill Clinton's Communist love child or whatever they wanted to hear.
But, getting back to Gene Lyons: His columns have not received the attention they deserve because they run exclusively in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a relatively small paper. Still, a lot of us have been flocking to their website on Wednesdays to read him…though we no longer do this. On October 1, the Democrat-Gazette began charging five bucks a month for on-line access…an experiment that will almost certainly flop. When you can read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and hundreds of other papers for free, why would you pay for a smaller paper with so little unique content?
Actually, I was almost willing to part with the fiver just to read Lyons but, before it came to that, strangers began to e-mail me his first column of October, and Bartcop (a left-wing, sometimes-wacko site) posted it, as linked above. In fact, I have now been e-mailed his column five times, all by folks I don't know but who saw me mention on this site that I enjoyed his work. A whole Gene Lyons Bootleg network has spontaneously erupted and it seems to me that, as a result of his paper making it harder to see his writings, it's now a lot easier. Given the topic of his first column that was affected this way, it's especially ironic.