This week I am in New York for a child safety training session. After eight hours of work teaching kids how to avoid bullying and act respectfully toward each other, I went back to my hotel room and found the TV airwaves saturated with the story of Ann Coulter's continuing insults to John Edwards.
The brief on-air exchange between Coulter and Elizabeth Edwards was magnified into hours of coverage from Hardball to Good Morning America. Hardball was particularly interesting since Chris Matthews expressed a near-fawning admiration for Elizabeth Edwards, yet his show was the one that gave Coulter the floor just a day earlier. Pop will eat itself. The clips will live on via YouTube, of course.
Now that the iPhone will have a dedicated YouTube function and other services like Verizon's VCast are providing video to our phones, the question will be, is there anything on worth watching?
I have never owned a video iPod so I haven't tried integrating mobile video into my life yet. I can see downloading The Office or The Daily Show from the iTunes store for an occasional long trip, but I have no desire to make television part of my daily mobile phone experience. Thank goodness that our essential right to free speech is also accompanied by the power to choose which conversations and political dialogues are worth listening to. The attack by Coulter on the Edwards family reminds me that the most powerful button on any device remains the off switch.