Friday links! Fourth estate edition

Proof that CNN is white

Proof that CNN is white

Maybe I just spent all week with cops urging me to end the violence by lying on the ground, but I am a little worried about what wags call the cult of compliance. More than our courts, it is our psychological relation to the police that determines how free we are. Fortunately, America has a robust and principled media that relentlessly asserts the rights of the citizen against powerful forces. And I have these vast, leathery wings, which allow me to buffet people or, if necessary, fly away. So I don’t need a vigorous public discourse to prevent my democracy from collapsing into a police state. Today is Saturday, and ifs and buts have become, without our really doing anything, candy and nuts. Won’t you join the truth telling contest with me?

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Wikipedia to go dark in protest of SOPA

Oh, boy! I'm shutting down this website and making it a crime for search engines to link to it!

Wikipedia, the massive online library of free papers for freshman rhetoric, will go dark on Wednesday in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act. The act, currently pending in the House of Representatives, would allow the justice department to shut down websites accused of posting copyrighted content and/or block access to those sites via US internet providers. That doesn’t seem so bad, until you consider that much of the content on many of the most popular websites is user-generated—which is to say movie- and TV-generated and, you know, stolen. Sony Pictures could get the Justice Department to shut down YouTube, if it wanted, because people posted videos of Spider Man. And that’s to say nothing of copyrighted Facebook avatars, copyrighted samples, copyrighted Evanescence lyrics on strippers’ blogs, and copyrighted information.

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