You people make me sick.

Hey, fair go! I was only putting forward a possible excuse for Net Nanny on a community access computer excluding reasonably innocuous political and social comment sites such as Larvatus Prodeo or Catallaxy.

then surreptiously pissing in the punchbowl.

More of that Nabs, but I must assume you do that simultaneously while explaining your “Big Bang Theory” to the punchbowl owner’s girlfriends?

The Australian editor acted like “a thug” when he pulled Tim’s post AND those who had commented. He pretended to run blogs but allowed their columnists to kill comments that they did not like and then even turned on an employee. It is like as a doctor, the management team coming into your office and saying they about to cut back on the amount of medicine you are able to subscribe.

At least, accept a newspaper is not an ordinary workplace. When it behaves like that, as gandhi said, it is a “threat to democracy”. It should be a purveyor of freedom of speech, first and foremost.

Seems clear to me!

More than a touch of irony methinks!

Murdoch’s lack of integrity, which helped build his empire, has become it’s greatest liability.

Now why does that remind me of John Howard…?

I suspect Tim’s criticism of the Oz editorial might have been tolerated were it not for this sentence:

The idea that he [Peter Brent] can’t comment without the editor of The Australian ringing him up to say they are going to “go� him is disturbing.

At that level, it gets personal. Hence the backlash.

But of course Dunlop is 100% correct – such thuggish behaviour from a leading newspaper editorial team really is outrageous. IMHO it is a threat to democracy. Unfortunately, it is also par for the course in the ass-kissing rottweiler world of News Ltd.

If Tim can hammer out a deal with the News Ltd elites, get a (renewed?) guarantee of independence, and maybe even a public apology, then good luck to him. If his patience and diplomacy lead to a decreased power base for Sham-I-am and his ilk, even better.

I just don’t think it’s gonna happen like that. Time will tell.

Most of the above commentary directed at ghandi’s perceived failings and ‘we all have to compromise’ and ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ cliches, entirely misses the point.

Well, Adrien, that depends on what one thinks the point is, or whether one thinks there’s more than one issue at stake here.

Those of us who came realtively late to blogging (late 2005 in my case), or who are not naturally of an oppositional cast of mind, or both, don’t necessarily accept the notion of blogging’s main role as being an adversarial Other to the MSM, as per that brilliant comment up there of patrickg’s and also for other reasons — but much of the discussion assumes that relationship.

(For me, for example, blogging’s main political advantage is the way it facilitates direct communication on public affairs between concerned citizens, without the intervention of business and party-political interests or other forms of editorial manipulation and spin.)

But I do take Mark’s point about the moment in Blog Meets MSM when push comes to shove via honest critique, just as the point also needs to be taken about any company in its right mind paying an employee to trash them under their own banner. So maybe the whole thing really was just doomed to not work. Personal experience of being head-hunted by organisations and then having them insist that tying my tongue and Botoxing my entire face was part of the deal has taught me that cultural organisations do tend to co-opt someone for their perceived independence and then immediately try to take it away from them when things get sticky.