Peter A Clarke

Janet Albrechtson has a reasonble political antena. For that I respect her.  When she steps out and starts talking philosophy she is a red meat eating conservative of fairly unsubtle tone.  Her take on civil liberties is High Tory and sniffy at individual rights. So I was on red alert when I read the banner headline South Park gag makes a mockery of freedom of expression. I was expecting an attack on free speech for the sake of western values etc… Don’t join the bad guys… The liberal self loathing intellectuals blah blah..

But the banner is total nonsense.  It has nothing to do with the article.  It is utterly misleading.  The article is not a particularly flash up and down the wicket defence of free speech, even of the obnoxious kind and a kick against Islamic Fascist behaviour in forcing self censorship.  As an article it is a very rough second draft of a first year essay.  I agree with her sentiments but an unsubtle defence of free speech by throwing slabs of anecdotes is pretty sloppy journalism and worse commentary.  It is padding pure and simple.  I guess it is hard to push out a piece week in week out but Janet this is a fairly drab effort on a very, very important topic.

The real question out of this article is what to do with sub editors who screw up so monumentally in affixing  a clearly wrong banner headline to a piece.