Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush administration memos that argue for the justification of torture techniques has been all over the news. Something else has raised a bit of ruckus in journalism academia circles, and that is Mike Allen’s account for Politico on how the decision was made.

Allen wrote a fairly short piece that led with the news that Obama consulted a wide range of sources before making his decision. In the fifth paragraph of this eight-paragraph story, Allen chose to “balance” the piece with anonymous quotes from a former Bush staffer who railed against the decision. The staffer accused the administration of putting America in danger, a fairly weighty claim. Read more

We’re going through free speech stuff in JOUR 1100 this week, and Hans Meyer’s recent post about a court decision regarding free speech and the Net got me thinking a little bit.

I’d recommend reading the story and Hans’ post, because the combination of the two raise serious concerns about what happens when courts force site operators to release the names of contributors in cases of libel.

The thing I’m thinking about in the wake of this decision is that it’s really time for us to step back and think about what it means to associate online. This is really the heart of my dissertation, because we don’t think enough about what it means to talk together in online formats. Read more