Did you watch Stephen Colbert address the White House Correspondent's Dinner? (It's available on C-SPAN)
It started off slow, then it got hilarious, and then it got really awkward. Colbert was using sarcasm to level some extremely serious criticism at the President and his Press Corp poodles - and they were IN THE ROOM. It's one thing to laugh at people behind their back but it's another thing to publicly call attention to someone misdeeds.
I kept watching and I kept thinking: someone is going to get fired for this...
Remember back in the Presidents first term, people were quietly saying that the reason the press was so soft on Bush was fear of retaliation. If you spoke out against the President, you would never work again in D.C. Bush and Rove hold grudges and take it personal. Valarie Plame, anyone?
Would this hurt Stephen's career? Maybe not. But whoever hired him for the event, that anonymous person, was likely to get creamed.
This morning I read an interesting article about mini-Microsoft. The blogger is anonymous and apparently rather afraid for his career. I feel for him.
Most people have a rather idealistic view of "whistelblowers" that has little resemblance to the truth. Speaking truth to power is a lonely place and people may support you in private but they run for cover in public. The establishment, big and small, dont want to hear it and one takes a huge risk in speaking up whether the issue is cigarettes and cancer, racism, or just workplace politics. Instead of a hero's welcome, you will get ostracism, threatened, fired and you may even get killed.
As the Chinese say: the nail that sticks out, gets the hammer.
Im just thankful that some people are willing to suffer the hammer to do the right thing.
Microsoft's mystery insider
May 28, 2006
The voice on the line, which had been easy and confident with a staccato laugh, suddenly lowers with concern.
It's because I mention his first name. "Please don't put that in the paper, Danny," the voice says. "I don't know what would happen, but I'm not ready to risk being exposed."
I'm talking to the notorious Mini-Microsoft. At least I think I am. He's an employee at the Redmond software company who for two years now has written an anonymous, harshly critical Web log about life in the belly of the beast.
Minimsft.blogspot.com, his Web site, is chock-full of the kind of piercing self-analysis the bland corporate land does its best to avoid.
His own company? It's a "passionless, process-ridden, lumbering idiot," he writes.
The bloat in the beast? It's scores of bad tech-boom-era hires, who suck up time and money "writing crappy code, doing crappy testing and designing crappy features."
The culprit? Tone-deaf and boosterish management, he says. He's even mused whether Microsoft would be better off without its head cheerleader, CEO Steve Ballmer.
Mini is one of hundreds of bloggers at Microsoft. Yet he's earned a Zorro-like status. Speculation is rampant about who he is and if he'll be outed and fired. His site, with thousands of comments from Microsoft workers, has been dubbed a "virtual union hall."
