Yahoo “Censorship”? Nah.

People are asking what happened to my column “Why We Hate Bush.” That piece suddenly vanished from Yahoo’s News Op-Ed section yesterday, causing readers to ask if John Ashcroft’s jack-booted thugs had finally appeared to drag me off to Gitmo.

Actually, there are occasional software glitches over at Yahoo, and this was one of them. “Why We Hate Bush” was an old column that mysteriously resurfaced to the top of the Ted Rall section a few days ago for no reason. We caught the error and uploaded my new column from yesterday, about next year’s Necropublican National Convention, and thus bumped “Why We Hate Bush” into the archives.

Censorship certainly is a reality in the media; even so-called “alternative” newspapers refused, for example, to send me to cover the war in Iraq despite the fact that my pieces from Afghanistan won several awards and were lauded by The Washington Post, The Nation and others as the best war correspondent’s reports filed by an American reporter. They were pretty overt about why–they didn’t think their readers would be happy to hear anything negative…and they had reason to think I might look a little deeper than the typical clueless embedded types.

Yahoo, however, has yet to suppress my pieces and I count them among one of my better clients. These software problems do come up now and then, however, so this probably isn’t the last time I’ll have people wondering if the First Amendment is coming under fire.

By the way, if you’re looking for “Why We Hate Bush,” one of my more incendiary pieces as of late, you can still find it here.