Last week, I posted a piece about liberty by Dan Gillmor that I thought was the best speech on the subject I’d seen in years. Afterwards, Dan and I traded e-mails and I invited him to expand on the piece on my America Weekend show, which he did yesterday.
We discussed the balance between security and liberty, how the US has punished itself for a dozen years in reaction to the 9/11 attacks, and whether our leaders — and we as a society — have gone too far in restricting our liberties. I also asked him how he answers people who say, “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.” And we talked about the media’s role in exacerbating a culture of fear, especially in local TV news.
Listen to our conversation here.
Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Centre for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School Of Journalism.