From NY Times: Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.

From Anne Midgette in The Washington Post: A couple of weeks ago, I started a long blog post about the fact that Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, had gone after a freelance blogger for WQXR and managed to get the station to take down a blog post she wrote that was critical of him. I’m annoyed that I didn’t post my piece -- somehow I was prevented from finishing it to my satisfaction -- because it focused on two topics I thought were relevant to the story. One is the state of journalism in today’s media climate: the institution that hosted the blog clearly didn’t understand the nature of journalistic responsibility (including the fact that once something is published, you can distance yourself from it by plastering it with editors’ notes, but taking it down is not kosher). The other is the way that people who get criticized respond to criticism in an age when you can answer anything, immediately, on-line.

Teaching social media can be especially challenging when you’re presenting to a group of journalists with varying levels of social media experience.

The last image of the series shows a police officer cocking his fist to punch a protester. By itself, it’s easily read as (another) act of police brutality against citizens exercising their constitutional rights. But context is everything, as the rest of Cassella’s images illustrate: The police officer is throwing the punch to stop a protester from swinging a heavy stick (for the second time) at the head of another police officer who had lost his helmet.

Back in 2002, Martina Navratilova gave an interview to Connie Chung at CNN. Navratilova is a tennis player who had some strong political opinions regarding the Bush administration's consolidation of power post-9/11. Of course, the memory of 9/11 was still quite strong for a lot of people back in 2002, and that led to a rather disgusting exchange in which Connie Chung tells Navratilova to "go back to Czechoslovakia", despite the fact that Navratilova had lived in the US for 27 years. Of course, you shouldn't need a reason or a defence when it comes to expressing dissent in the first place, but to argue that is considered radical in the eyes of the US populace, even today.