Then on Monday, the New York Times  reported on how Sam Zell was about to cut “500 pages of news each week from the company’s dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. ”

The story added:

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is this: Newspapers around the United States have tried a lot of approaches, newsy to fluffy, parochial to international, voluminous to sparse — and all are in trouble.

Moyers referenced all this in his speech. Of course, we have been chronicling it here for months and months. I am worried as is everyone that quality journalism might disappear, but in the last week I have been to both  the Media Reform conference  and the Journalism that Matters conference which preceded it. At both there were dozens, maybe hundreds of people trying to reinvent journalism, to preserve its best qualities. To tell truth to power.

To me it is the American Dream at work. Each of us has the power to participate in the Democracy and to work to save it, despite all the forces that want to consolidate power into the hands of the few. Each day we have to stand up to them and look for ways keep the spirit and reality of journalism alive. But listen to Bill Moyers he says it better than I. It is truly a great speech.

One final note think of people like Sam Zell and people like Bill Moyers. Which of the two would you want in charge of your most precious democratic institutions? We have to take action now.

With opposition protests blocked by the authorities in Pakistan, NYTimes.com is asking readers in Pakistan to help us report on events in the country by sending us eyewitness accounts of protests in photographs, video or text.

To submit a picture, please send it by e-mail to the following address: world.nyt@gmail.com — and let us know when and where the photograph was taken and what it depicts. Please also include your name, but if you would prefer not to be identified, let us know that as well.

Thanks to Editor & Publisher for the pointer.

Let’s start first with my Op-Ed piece today that was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Congress can’t muzzle free speech: Condemning Petraeus critics, lawmakers ignore Constitution

The second is my letter to Romenesko with the headline: Witt blasts NYT public editor’s column on MoveOn.org ad .

 My premise in the first is that the U.S. Senate has injured the First Amendment of the United States Constitution by voting to: “strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.” If we have to worry about one of the highest legal branches of the Federal government “condemning” our use of free speech, then how free is that speech.

In my open letter to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, I say he is too worried about decorum at the expense of free speech.  As you might notice from the tone of my letter, I am more worried about free speech than I am about decorum.

It is time that all of us to speak out now, and help to put the brakes on the trend to attack free speech via condemning its speakers when we don’t like what we hear.