free speech

There's been a lot of back and forth in the last few days about the incident at the recent Society of Environmental Journalists' conference in which a journalist trying to question Al Gore saw his microphone cut off.

Lots of folks out in the blogosphere are saying SEJ censored a journalist. I'm here to tell you it ain't so, and explain that at journalism conferences and press conferences, where lots of journos are waiting with questions, we just don't give other journos carte blanche to dominate the microphone. I'll also point out how the supposedly censored filmmaker could have been a lot more effective.

[caption id="attachment_5035" align="alignright" width="150" caption="This Gore mug's a little dated, but at least I am sure it's in the public domain."][/caption]

(Full disclosure: I'm a member of SEJ's board of directors. So I'm predisposed to defend the organization. But I'm also a journalist who, were I to mar my body with a tattoo, would have "Question Authority" stamped indelibly onto my wrist or forehead or some other conspicuous place. Also consider that I came on the environment beat in the late 1980s amid an explosion of stories about this new threat called global warming. I asked a lot of skeptical questions before finally seeing by 1997 that the science was being proved out.