Correspondence
Correspondence MORE MOYERS STEPHEN F. HAYES's ludicrous attempt to link the Columbia Journalism Review's praise of Bill Moyers to a grant from the Schumann Foundation (a foundation Moyers heads)...
...That year, Moyers's foundation gave Columbia's journalism school $340,426...
...Moyers, by the way, was one of several dozen singled out in a special 40th anniversary issue of CJR...
...MICAH ARBISSER Beijing, China ETHAN GUTMANN RESPONDS: Micah Arbisser assumes that the Chinese people want their computer use to be restricted and monitored...
...Chinese portals require a government ID card number to sign up for a free e-mail account, but officials don't check the information for validity...
...We can't legally poll the Chinese people on any topic without first submitting our survey questions to the Chinese State Statistical Bureau...
...Moyers subsequently received the "Gold Baton," the "highest honor of the annual Alfred I. DuPont/Columbia University Awards in television and radio...
...Goldstein and Laventhol object to my citing the November/ December 2001 issue of CJR...
...and Cisco have a moral responsibility (as the author suggests) to refuse to do business with Beijing or to sabotage Beijing's efforts at controlling information...
...And, as Goldstein conceded in a subsequent e-mail to me, the Schumann Foundation also gave the school $20,000 annually from 1996-99 to employ a webmaster for the Columbia Journalism Review...
...Unless they have the same confidence that Arbisser has in the answer, they aren't likely to allow a test of his hypothesis...
...TOM GOLDSTEIN DAVID LAVENTHOL Columbia School of Journalism New York, NY STEPHEN F. HAYES RESPONDS: The facts are these: Moyers's foundation approved the three-year, $2 million grant in 1996...
...Even then the filtering proponents have a real argument...
...Not just on the job, not just in cybercafés, but in their homes...
...And the prepaid cards are entirely anonymous, unless the government takes the extra step of tracing the phone call...
...I did so because it was the most recent mention of Moyers, but I certainly could have included others...
...It's quite possible that Moyers would have won such adulation from Columbia's journalism school and CJR even if his foundation hadn't contributed millions of dollars over the past decade...
...They believe in free speech, but they also believe the benefits of filtering outweigh the restrictions on individual rights...
...The awards honored programs aired "between July 1, 1998, and June 30, 1999...
...Guttenplan, praising a Moyers special on money-in-politics as one of the "high watermarks of televised politics this year...
...For instance, Laventhol himself praises Moyers in the May/June 2000 issue, citing Moyers's "unique, distinguished career in television...
...This is precisely why Chinese ISPs and cybercafés are required to save surfing histories and user information for State Security's use...
...Indeed, I could have reached back even further, to a 1992 piece written for CJR by Village Voice writer D.D...
...The grant was disbursed in four $500,000 payments in 1996, 1997, and 1998...
...In the United States, if a company wants to install network filters to prevent employees from doing inappropriate things on the Internet with company time and resources, few people would object...
...Contrary to the article's suggestion, Internet cafés are springing up, not closing down, everywhere...
...Most Chinese Internet users don't go through a traceable subscription-based "ISP" as we know them in the United States...
...Feb...
...Unfortunately we won't know if Arbisser would win his bet...
...Sure, prepaid Internet cards seem anonymous, unless, as Arbisser correctly stipulates, "the government takes the extra step of tracing the phone call...
...They either use Internet cafés or prepaid Internet cards (purchased on the street just like prepaid phone cards) with home computers...
...This sort of writing arouses anti-American sentiment in China...
...CHICOM.COM ETHAN GUTMANN assumes all things Chinese Communist are inherently evil and that a free Internet is what is best for China ("Who Lost China's Internet...
...But if it is "ludicrous" merely to suggest that such a relationship be disclosed, then Columbia's J-school must have rewritten its rules since I graduated...
...We only have debates when such systems are installed in public places like schools and libraries...
...Former Columbia dean Joan Konner—who used to work for Moyers and later joined the Schumann Board—devoted her "publisher's note" in July/August 1995 to reprinting Moyers's defense of public television...
...In my use of university computer centers, public Internet cafés, and prepaid dialup cards, I haven't noticed any of the signs of systemic surveillance described in the article (although censorship is present in bulletin board posts and DNS restrictions...
...Among others were George Will, William Safire, and Rush Limbaugh...
...Correspondence MORE MOYERS STEPHEN F. HAYES's ludicrous attempt to link the Columbia Journalism Review's praise of Bill Moyers to a grant from the Schumann Foundation (a foundation Moyers heads) missed this important point: The grant was given six years ago when there was a different dean and a different editor who have nothing to do with the magazine's current management ("PBS's Televangelist," Feb...
...So this much is clear: Moyers received Columbia's "highest honor" in broadcast journalism at the same time his foundation was giving more than $2 million to the school...
...More importantly, though, I'm not sure that companies like Yahoo...
...Some of the article's claims are unsubstantiated...
Vol. 7 • March 2002 • No. 25
