Why the tone, Ernest?
Because, in case you haven't been aware of it, accusing a journalist of censorship is a very serious thing.
Ray Suarez
Mr. Suarez, Well, in that case, I owe you an apology for the poor choice of the word "censor", and I suspected it as much after thinking about your replies. I am more accustom to the use of "censor" not so much in the deliberate and conspiratorial sense as you might be taking it. Allow me to point to the books by Project Censored, which, I believe, never directly accuse any news organizations of deliberately censoring for the purpose of covering up anything. Their prime accusation is that the news mechanism as a component of a democratic society have filters whose optimizations have been taken advantage of by organizations actually desiring the cover up. I think the intelligence agencies are probably good at this (if not, they are not doing their job), and I am sure the FBI is a quick study on this topic of just how fast news spreads through the media, and how certain news do or do not make it through the media channels. The FBI and the NSA have often been targets of lawsuits and Congressional scrutiny in the past, so they probably have organizational structures to help defend against such scrutiny. This does not automagically imply some sort of big brother conspiracy, but if the resources are there to spin their agenda, I doubt they will say, "well this is not ethical to use for our own purposes ...". Unlike many right wing extremists, I'm not even trying to accuse the FBI or the NSA of deliberately trying to fool the American public for some evil purposes. My belief is that larger and larger secret bureaucracies have a certain behavior which could have the net result of undermining democratic principles, so while it is not the news organizations fault that they may have been taken advantage of, we often have to depend on the news organizations themselves dig themselves out and to counter act this effect. Daniel Patrick Moynihan recently released a book on the topic of secrecy and the effect on bureaucracy, and I was quite impressed by the N Y Times excerpt. By the way, I don't know if you understand why I'm so concerned about this topic, but I do want to clear the basic problems: 1. I am NOT accusing you or TOTN of censoring the wiretap topic. a. All connotations of "censor". 2. I am accusing you and TOTN of censorin the topic of the lack of reporting by main stream media on that specific hour. a. Only the specific mechanical connotation of "censor" which means not putting the topic on the air. b. I am questioning the relevance of some of the calls relative to mine. 1) I will grant that due to the mechanism of pre-screens, that you might not have understood the specific nature of my topic, and might have thought I just wanted to talk about wire taps. c. I will grant that that there are many reasons why stories/items get dropped on the floor, mostly not the evil conspiratorial reasons. I can even imagine a few of these reasons myself. However, a discussion of news organizations and how they decide why one story is dropped and another is put on is worth knowing (that was what I wanted to ask you on the air). On this particular exchange, you might also want to explain how you pick and choose callers on the air. Of course, you cannot put every caller on the air. So how do you choose? Is there a control of flow factor? Doubtful in that particular hour. I am sure there is some attempt to limit the digression of the topics. Is there some intangible mood factor analogous to a club DJ's emotional sync with the dance crowd? Ern