"Is ANYONE allowed to misspeak anymore?" wrote Chad from Virginia in a comment on last week's New York Times story about the fall of Octavia Nasr, a senior editor for Middle East Affairs at CNN fired for too-sweet a tweet: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah ... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."

Was Twitter a window to Nasr's secretly biased soul -- or a new journalistic activity that produced a torrent of trivia? It didn't matter what clarification or context she added to the comment, namely that she was talking about a Shiite cleric's relatively progressive stance on women's rights and honor killings and not his endorsement of suicide bombing or denunciations of Israel and the U.S.

But, as Chad put it, "In an era when reporters and editors are being required to tweet and blog and everything else without a net, folks are going to make mistakes. She was expressing herself in 140 characters or less, and she definitely messed up, but her explanation seems reasonable. One stray tweet and she loses her job?"

Foot-in-mouth disease has scored several other journalistic victims recently: The superannuated White House correspondent Helen Thomas launched herself into retirement with a rant against Israel much like a jaundiced lemming propelled by a cliff, while David Weigel, a blogger covering conservative politics for the Washington Post, was forced to resign after his apparent contempt for his subjects (divulged on a "private" listserv with 400 leftie journalists) became a furious matter of public record.

As Michelle Cottle observed in the New Republic, the new media landscape was giving journalists a taste of what it's like to be a politician: "Just like pols, journalists are policed (often most viciously by one another) for impolitic comments. And, as with pols, the odds that journalists will wind up flossing with their own shoelaces rises along with the pressure to become brand-name personalities sharing a constant stream of off-the-cuff insights on blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc."

In the recent Pew Survey on the future of the Internet, one expert hoped that it would create a new "art of politics." But a political environment where artlessness is even more deadly than before can only produce the wrong kind of political tableau.

As William Beaman, editor of Politics magazine, told me in the wake of the last presidential election, "The real sea change is for candidates. Every second of their lives is being reported, and they have become even more cautious and programmed, if that's possible to imagine. There's very little privacy left." The campaigns now face the daily risk of being blown up by YouTube and forced to react to people who haven't experienced what they're writing about first hand.

Overshadowing all is the Icarus-like descent of Gen. Stanley McCrystal, burnt, largely, by his gibbering proxies and by a reporter who judged indiscretion the better part of, well, at least journalistic valor. While hawkish media critics applauded Michael Hastings--the Rolling Stone reporter who published McCrystal's disparaging comments about the Obama administration and the war in Afghanistan--as a hero for daring to break the cozy détente between press and Pentagon, they elided over the bigger ethical picture, namely, that the liberties we take cannot always be justified in the name of liberty.

The problem is not just that discretion can enable corruption, but that indiscretion, refracted through the principle "that the people shall know," corrupts too. It reduces everything to a naive painting, shorn of perspective, cartoonly childlike and prey to the fanaticism of the bully. The consequences will not only be a political discourse scripted to death, it will be one where striking first and rallying the mob will be the decisive art.

This new inquisition will not spare journalists; it has not, in the case of Nasr. CNN provided no evidence that her tweet reflected a pattern of biased news judgment (and if the network's Star Chamber produced such evidence in private conference, then why was she not let go for such substantive reasons long ago?). Journalists are quick to decry government and the courts for decisions that have a "chilling effect" on democracy, but when news organizations demand their reporters tweet without editorial supervision, and then fire them for 19 words, it is the media that are doing the chilling.

The reason is this: There is no longer a line between misspeaking and opinion, and when opinion is judged outside the court of context, there is no longer a line between opinion and thought crime. One may criticize Nasr's journalistic acumen and question her political judgment, but a mediated culture where everything is narrative and where any part of the narrative may be used against you at any time looks, increasingly, like those cultures where the consequences of impurity and impiety are deadly.

Trevor Butterworth is the editor of stats.org, an affiliate of George Mason University that looks at how numbers are used in public policy and the media. He writes a weekly column for Forbes. that looks at how numbers are used in public policy and the media. He writes a for Forbes., an affiliate of that looks at how numbers are used in public policy and the media. He writes a for Forbes.