If 300 million of us are going to live together peacefully then there must necessarily be some societal mechanism to allow for the free flow of conflicting ideas and opinions. When one part of the polity gains control of that mechanism and then seeks to exclude contradictory ideas and deprecate those idea-holders we have a problem that challenges the very basis of our social contract.

For example, the Swifities would qualify as competent witnesses in any court in the civilized world because their testimony is what they saw and heard with their own eyes and ears. Yet the Swifites testimony is automatically branded as useless and the witnesses themselves are branded as liars and operatives. The Swifiies don’t even get into the court of public opinion. Kitty Kelley writes a book based by her own admission on second and third hand hearsay (not admissible in any court) and she gets three days on national television.

If the President of the United States can’t get a fair shake from the likes of CBS, NBC, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, and the NYT how can any of us hope that the free flow of ideas will survive even a little more effective control? Thank God for the blogoshpere (which is rapidly turning Hayek into an epochal genius), but unless Rather and CBS go down hard enough to change behaviour we are losing this war.