A journalistic ex nihilo from blogger Mary Shaw

Mary Shaw, a blogger over at the left-tilted Smirking Chimp, recently got her knickers in a twist over the Liberty Medal organization's treatment of a speech by U2's lead singer, Bono.

Let's let Mary tell it:

While Bono's entire acceptance speech was quite good, I was particularly moved when he spoke out against the use of torture. He said, "You do not have to become a monster to defeat a monster."

Indeed. Very well put.

If terrorists stuck with waterboarding instead of their other nefarious schemes we wouldn't need to bother with them much. But I shouldn't interrupt (I'm not presenting her entire piece, by the way, just selected portions that convey the gist of her post).

However, two days after the event, I downloaded the official video of Bono's speech at www.libertymedal.org. And I discovered that the official video had been edited so that it no longer contains the references to torture, or other portions of the speech that apparently were not acceptable to The Powers That Be.

"[O]fficial video," eh?

Yes, this is America, land of the free. Or so it once appeared to be.

Let's face it: When you feel you must censor the acceptance speech of a Liberty Medal recipient, something is seriously wrong.

(go here if you want to read the whole thing)

I got wind of this story via another left-tilted blog called "Kickin' the Darkness." Shaw's outrage spread into the left lobe of the blogosphere (as of this writing, the majority of the hits on Google's Blog search parrot the censorship line).

It was Oct. 1 by the time I started investigating this story. When I visited the Liberty Medal site, they had an edited version and a full version of the ceremony plainly labeled, as well as a link to the transcript of Bono's speech.

Perhaps the watchdogs from lefty blogs intimidated the censors into promptly caving in? No self-respecting hater of free speech would give in that quickly. I looked for and found a cached version of the Liberty Medal site, from Sept. 29--one day before Shaw sounded the alarm.



Click the image for a detailed view.

There's no text describing anything about an "official" version, and the www.6abc.com link goes straight to the unedited version.

So, unless the site changed between the 29th and the 30th when Shaw posted about Liberty Medal's supposed censorship, there was no official version and Liberty Medal provided a full version of the speech via link. By Oct. 1, the same page had been updated to note that one of the videos was "ceremony highlights" while the 6abc version was "the complete speech."

In short, this strongly suggests that Shaw jumped to conclusions and helped initiate an unfounded smear of the Liberty Medal organization.

The less of this type of thing that I see in the blogosphere (regardless of the lobe), the happier I'll be.

Liberty Medal was careless not to note that one of the links led to an edited version of the speech, but that is light years away from censorship.


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