1) Amy Goodman and Brit Hume: one is listened to by about one-half of one percent of the population, and the other watched by about 50%. That's balance.

2) Juan Williams is a lefty balance? He's the Broder of NPR. I rarely hear progressive advocacy coming out of his mouth. Going back to when he hosted Talk of the Nation, I regularly felt he was a right-wing stooge.

3) You cannot compare the GUESTS on NPR news shows with Brit Hume who is a HOST of a show. When have you ever heard one of the hosts of ATC etc. espousing partisan political opinion to the extent that Hume does?

Perhaps for every smart thing said by an analyst on NPR, another one should say something stupid. And for every truth told, they should also trot out a lie. Then the right would be happy.

Are there no limits to the right of academic freedom? Teaching a radical theory is different from advocating violence or regularly presenting lies to students. What if a professor exhorted students to rob banks? And told them how to do it? What about the biology professor who teaches students in a public university that evolution is a satanic lie? I don't think either academic has a 'right' to advocate such views without it posing a threat to their promised life-time employment, frequently on a public payroll. I say this as a public university professor who regularly pushes the boundaries of what I think I can responsibly advocate to my students - but I know such boundaries exist.

Those with primary responsibility for evaluating/critiquing faculty for the purpose of promotion and tenure are their academic colleagues, not academic administrators. Academic disciplines self-police, generally. On campuses today faculty throw around the phrase 'academic freedom' like a get-out-of-jail-free-card to excuse some truly egregious mis-uses of power and actions destructive to learning. I'm simply advocating that the notion be examined a bit, and be more clearly defined.

"I'd say this: It's quite permissable in my book to teach that the theory of evolution is incorrect, provided one has an alternate theory, and has what one believes is evidence which supports it."

That's exaclty my point - you say that it WOULD be wrong for a professor to advocate an idea that does not have evidence to support it. This is a limit on academic freedom. I was only arguing that the freedom of a professor to say anything they want is not unlimited, which seems to be in contrast to what Genn is saying.

Do your colleagues claim their academic freedom is being violated when they are chastised for calling students idiots in class? When they are called-out for spreading lies about colleagues during university meetings? Mine do. If that is happening across the country, then yes, academic freedom is under assault, and I'm glad for it. Like everyone else, professors can act like assholes, and they shouldn't be able to get a free pass for it by calling it 'academic freedom.' All I've been trying to say is that there is no common understanding of what 'academic freedom' MEANS. It can't just be the freedom to say anything you want, anywhere you want. So, what is it?

The last book I read about String Theory, "Warped Passages" (I think it came out last year), claims an accelerator being built in Europe now might soon be powerful enough to test some of the predictions of string theory, so it would be falsafiable. Einstein's theories were famously not testible for over a generation after he developed them. The question is in the abstract, could you imagine an experiment to test a particular idea? With string theory, though it can't currently be tested, theoretical physicists can imagine what such an experiment would look like and work toward a near future when it can be done. Intelligent Design cannot be tested by any known experimental method.

Ah, now we seem to be getting to the nub of the gist. Or whatever. I don't think anyone has argued that Islam is better than Judaism or Christianity. The point is they are pretty much the same. Christianity used to be unified around the literal truth of the bible (leading to the slaugher of nonbelievers and heretics), and then moved away from that stance (peaking, in the US, a a while ago), and we are now currently moving back toward literalism in the US (an increasingly radical christianity, if you will). Islam was relatively secularized in many countries until the early part of the 20th c. when political forces and the fall of the Ottoman empire radicalized much of the middle east. People like Ramadan seem to be trying to move the Islamic world back away from radicalism. What is wrong with that? By de-radicalizing Islam, he is trying to dupe the west into thinking Islam is not radical? That's like saying I shouldn't try to improve my neighborhood because it would deceive people into thinking there isn't something wrong with my neighborhood.

Anamika is criticizing the same segments of the US population (the racists, the bullies) and the same US government policies (imperialism, neo-colonialism) that every US progressive I know also criticizes. That is not the same as 'hating Americans,' except in the eyes of the far right.

What a number of contributors to this thread fail to get is the difference in meaning between 'understanding' and 'justifying.' To understand the recent rise in Islamic radicalism, how it relates to historical/geopolitical forces outside the written word of the Koran, is not the same as justifying/supporting it. I could explain (partly) why we went to war with Iraq, but that wouldn't mean I was justifying it, or supported it. It would certaily not be equivalent to apologizing for it. And I certainly wouldn't claim we went to war because an inherently evil christian religion was controlling GWB's actions.