Why journalists should be free speech partisans

Following on the New York Times's decision to continue its critical coverage of China, despite the Chinese government's retaliation against it, Dan Gillmor calls on journalists and news organizations to abandon the pretense of "neutrality" and take a partisan stand for free speech in questions of censorship, surveillance, net neutrality, copyright takedown, and other core issues of speech in the 21st century.

What are these choke points? The most obvious is what’s happening to the Internet itself. In America and a number of other countries the telecommunications industry — often working with...