Center for Citizen Media

The editorial page editor of the Shreveport Times frets about the rancid writings of Ann Coulter, which appear on his page. Wondering, Hamlet-style, if he should replace her with a rational conservative, he says:

So while her harangues finally may have grown tiresome, we would be reluctant to pull her column from our pages based on her attack on widows, believing that would be flirting with censorship.

No, it’s not. Censorship is something a government does, or forces to occur via a third party.

Pulling her column would be flirting with common sense and honor, qualities that appear mysterious to this particular editor.

Lulu TV says it’ll help video creators make money, but I’m definitely unclear on the site’s concept. Peter Wayner, in the New York Times, says:

The Web site, which lets people upload and watch video clips, said last week that it would begin charging a $14.95 monthly fee for a “pro” account and putting 80 percent of that money into a special fund. Each month the money will be distributed among the video creators, with the biggest share going to the person who attracted the most viewers.

I still don’t get it.

One of the memorable moments during the excellent Fortune Brainstorm 2006 conference (probably the best organized such gathering I’ve ever attended) came this morning during a panel about corporate America’s deservedly troubled image. And one reason that this was such a good session was that a journalist rose to the occasion.

The panel had four members, including Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot, a man who has been hauling in beyond-extravagant pay and demonstrating almost pure arrogance with his employees and shareholders. His board, which overpaid him so absurdly, didn’t show up a the annual meeting, and Nardelli refused to answer direct questions, adjourning the “meeting” after a half hour.

I listened in amazement as he bemoaned our polarized society and called for good corporate governance. And like several others in the audience, I cheered when Norm Perlstine, a former top editor with the Wall Street Journal and the Time magazine empire, challenged Nardelli to justify himself given his record (including a Home Depot stock swoon while he’s been CEO, despite some actual accomplishments).

The CEO’s response was par for his course. He even went so far as to claim that he and his board thought the annual “to hell with shareholders” meeting was a brave experiment that, boo hoo, just didn’t quite work out.

Good for Fortune and company, not letting someone like this off the hook.

In my Brainstorm 2006 panel this morning, I was a somewhat lonely voice in the conversation about entertainment’s future in a Digital Age. Everyone was talking about monetization. I was talking about democratization of media.

At one point, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner seemed to dismiss bottom-up media as the rough equivalent of people walking down a dirt road, telling each other jokes. Hollywood was the real thing in his world.

Anything that’s good, he said, will be discovered by the talent agents, who’ll sign up the talent and make deals with Hollywood producers and their equivalents to make content for companies like Disney. Meetup’s Scott Heiferman was rolling his eyes from the audience. Me, too.

Sure, some of the great stuff will be captured by the current powers. But not all, and not always, unless they take such control of the Internet that they can get away with it. Let’s not allow them to get away with it.

UPDATED

It turns out that Fortune’s Brainstorm 2006 conference is on the record. Also, it turns out, my former Knight Ridder colleague Oliver Ryan, who’s now with Fortune, is blogging with his colleagues.

The backchannel: #brainstorm on irc.freenode.net for Internet Relay Chat.

Ross Mayfield challenges several of us who are attending to make public the answers we gave to some questions the Brainstorm organizers asked participants. Here are mine:

1. What is the most pressing problem to solve? Why?

Weaning the developed and developing world off of fossil and nuclear fuels and onto clean, renewable and—crucially—decentralized sources of energy. The most evil elements of global politics, as well as global warming, are intertwined with energy policies.

2. Your biggest fear?

I fear that security fears and/or a disease pandemic will curtail our experiments with economic and political liberty just as they are taking hold on a large scale. In America, we may be one terrorist attack away from the Bill of Rights being entirely neutered. We are grossly unprepared for a pandemic, which could easily cause the kind of societal breakdown that leads to dictatorship. I especially worry that Americans are not sufficiently interested anymore in liberty to protect what they may lose.

3. Three global leaders who will set next decade’s course?

George W. Bush (and his successor), Hu Jintao (and successor), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

4. Your most cherished value?

Honor.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is among the first to speak, and she’s eloquent on the threat now being posed to an independent American judiciary. She has “never seen such hostility to judges coming from the legislative branch,” plus some at the executive branch and at state levels.

She cites proposed legislation and polls showing that Americans are suspicious of “activist judges.” She asks, “What’s an activist judge?” Answer: what people who lose in court call the judges involved in the cases.

What the framers had in mind, she says, was a Constitution with a Bill of Rights and a judicial system that could enforce those rights and provisions. This is under a serious threat, she says, and we should all worry about this.

NY Times: ‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid: Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.

The Times is doing great work on this story, but no news organization has enough people to do the job the way it should be done. What we need is a citizen-journalism component, where people in the affected communities work with major media to expose the fraud that’s already occurred and prevent new lawbreaking.

This project is sitting there for someone to try. I hope someone will give it some thought.

I’m at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm conference in Aspen for the first time, participating in a session on the future of entertainment in a digital world.

The National Review, like its pals in the Bush administration, is in a froth over the New York Times’ valiant reporting on administration’s secretive spying on everyone and everything. Now, clueless on what it means to enjoy free-speech rights in our republic, the NR huffs and puffs:

Publications such as the Times, which act irresponsibly when given access to secrets on which national security depends, should have their access to government reduced. Their press credentials should be withdrawn. Reporting is surely a right, but press credentials are a privilege. This kind of conduct ought not be rewarded with privileged access.

Losing credentials to the White House press room? Good heavens! This has certainly impeded — not — the work of Seymour Hersh and other journalists who don’t have such access.

While this is profoundly stupid idea, it does raise an important issue. Access to government is the public’s right, not just that of a few privileged journalists.

Jay Rosen: The People Formerly Known as the Audience. The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

What traditional media folks need to do is welcome the former audience into the journalism process itself, in addition to celebrating (and pointing to) the best independent work. So far, the activity has been all too limited.

This is a survival question for media organizations. I wonder how long it will take for them to understand.

Rafat Ali at PaidContent discusses “The Next Big Step: Announcing Our Funding, from Patricof’s Greycroft Partners” — and we get another view of what’s coming in the business of blogging and other conversational media.