If you haven't clicked on the video of Stephen Colbert's trashing/roasting of Prez Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner ten days ago. then you may be out of luck. At least, if you use the the sources offered on an earlier LewRockwell blog post. According to a New York Times article entitled "A Comedian's Riff on Bush Prompts an E-Spat", C-Span, the nonprofit network that first showed Mr. Colbert's speech, wrote letters to the video sites YouTube.com and ifilm.com, demanding that the clips of the speech be taken off their Web sites. The action was a first for C-Span, whose prime-time schedule tends to feature events like Congressional hearings on auto fuel-economy standards.
No, it is not political censorship but a smart proprietary business move. One of the former host sites YouTube reported that "41 clips of the speech had been viewed a total of 2.7 million times in less than 48 hours," C-Span has chosen to stream the entire event at its own site, thus driving up its own traffic, and to sell DVD's "of the event for $24.95, including speeches and a comedy routine by President Bush with a President Bush imitator."
C-Span also cut some sort of deal with Google which allows the internet giant to offer the Colbert video here.
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