I don't believe you. Period. Fox is based in NYC, so is the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch owns the Post and Harper Collins, both based in NYC. ABC radio dominates drive times in NYC. Bloomberg is based in NYC. Bertlesman and Pearson too. And that's off the top of my head.

Anything you say here should be taken as fiction, no matter what name you use.

I do, of course, take the attitude when I'm on the job that I'm paid for my time or my skills and I should be busy using them and not talking politics. So generally my supervisors really don't know about my politics unless they ask.

I don't think I'd call that "censorship" either. I'd call it "work ethic" & "tact".

Those who complain about this putative suppression of free speech on the left have things neatly inverted: try to make a living in New York, SF, or LA as a conservative, and then come talk to me.

It's a purely American deal with a purely American odor of skunk. If you want to see it for what it is, I suggest re-reading Huckleberry Finn, specifically the passage where Colonel Sherburn faces down the lynch mob in daylight and makes it turn tail.

As Mark Twain, through his robust Southern gentleman, said then, the average man is a coward and a brave man is safe among them, whatever they think, as long as its not dark and they're not behind him.

The sad thing about it is the degree to which certain men in important positions of corporate priviledge or political power make it their business to stir up the mean spite of the cowards they lead by the nose to attack celebrities who disagree with them.

One would think if they were worthy of their stock options or their important office, they would have more important things to do.

Elton John's comments, made in New York, were quickly suppressed by officials, who detained John for questioning at an undisclosed location.

First, they came for the Communists, to paraphrase Martin Niemöller, and I didn't speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then, they came for the short, stout blokes from Watford with unconvincing wigs and enormous egos, and I did not speak up, because…

Forgive us for giggling. Sir Elton John, reflecting on the shortage of successful pop songs condemning the invasion of Iraq, tells Interview magazine: "There's an atmosphere of fear in America right now that is deadly. Everyone is too career-conscious. They're all too scared… Things have changed. I don't know if there's been a time when the fear factor has played such an important role in America since McCarthyism in the 1950s as it does right now."

We need to set Sir Elton's remarks in context. He is speaking out - risking, he seems to suggest, his career - at a time when Michael Moore's polemical anti-war film Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time. He is bravely breaking the wall of silence, at a time when the Left-wing writer Al Franken is basking in the success of a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

There are many complaints that may be levelled against the current US administration. The institutional persecution of free-thinking artistes is not one of them.

A trio of country singers, the Dixie Chicks, were rude about President Bush last year. Several local radio stations temporarily refused to play their records, and their album sold only six million copies. The comedienne Whoopi Goldberg was deprived of a lucrative sideline endorsing Slim-Fast diet products after making a crass joke punning on the pudendal connotations of the President's surname.
But the blacklisting of Communists in 1950s Hollywood - with the institutional support of the studios and the Screen Actors Guild - destroyed careers. To invoke it now is the purest fatuity.

And I don't recall the hue and cry when Limbaugh was dropped at the Florida Orange Juice spokemans, because he was considered too controversial.