As someone who is ideologically on the other side of the fence to you, I would have expected you to back up Ms Philips. You have shown a level of integrity that I didn't know existed.

What is Ms Philip's problem anyway? You don't need any journalistic qualifications to be a news reader/anchor, you just need the right make-up artist and the ability to read a teleprompter without stuttering. Even I am capable of that linguistic feat, and I'm no journalist.

She's a talking head. How long has it been since she did some real journalism of her own?

It's the people out in the field gathering the information who need guts, experience and integrity.

Australian "A Current Affair" journalist Jane Hansen was in Iraq when georgie bush jnr launched his oil-war under the false flag of 'terror'. She was ordered to return to Australia and she said on-air that she wasn't leaving because someone had to get the truth of what was really happening out to the rest of the world. The network continued with her reports until it reached the point where she and her team had absolutely no further choice but to leave, a story in itself deemed newsworthy: tapes, phones, and other equipment had to be abandoned or hidden, and how she passed what was virtually a strip-search without losing the satellite phone is a mystery best left unsolved.

Upon her return to Australia my guess is that she was punished for her 'disobedience'. She just 'vanished' from "A Current Affair"--yes her material was ratings-worthy, but it didn't toe the mainstream line.

If "Joe the Plumber" gets in and out of the Middle-East, even if his material doesn't have that polished edge of 'professionalism' (or again toe the MSM line), I lay odds that we people in the streets will want to know how all this is affecting 'those' people in the streets.

To the best of my knowledge the only rule I regularly break is the 40-word limit on a paragraph (or is it a single sentence)? I got in trouble at Uni for that: We were given readings where one sentence would go on an on for pages, and one virtually had to rewrite the whole thing in blank verse to be able to make head or tail of it, and then I was chastised for writing sentences of greater than half a page that parsed properly on the first reading. So go figure.