“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tyres around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”

I personally believe that our national literature has been damaged by decades of weakening the media’s watchdog position, and building it up will take time using the net. However, politicians are scrambling for reasons to close it up, as Former CIA Director Tenet did in a meeting where the press was excluded:

“I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability, but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control.” — Former CIA Director Tenet, in a meeting where the press was excluded

As for normal non-media citizens not dissenting, I probably agree that the US has such wonderful levels of free speech that there’s little pity for us not speaking our minds. On the other hand, at a software developers’ conference at Oslo, I heard a lot of people were criticizing foreign policy, which they couldn’t do at the workplace. (You can imagine businesses have an incentive to punish people for airing their opinions, on the perhaps naive fear of losing productivity.)

Joseph Pietro Riolo, you claim that not all dissenters are sincere. That is a second-order problem, which is not interesting to me because agreers are also insincere. What in fact happens is the least articulate dissenters are given the media spotlight, so it may seem to you that dissenter insincerity is somehow higher.

Jon Stewart argued on CSPAN [pdf transcript] that what we need is a media organization which is like Fox News in that it’s willing to be biased, but “geared towards NO BULLSHIT”:

“Why can�t you hire people that care about the truth? You know them, I know them, they�re good. You got people on blogs that are fact-checking as things happen. Some of those people are conspiracy theorists, some of them are really smart — have somebody at the center of it, who can be an arbiter of what�s real and what�s not. And make that network reactive. Fox is reactive. That�s why it�s working. Find one that is reactive to the devastating game of strategy that�s being played in Washington. I think it would make a shitload of money, and not only that you�d be able to sleep at night.”