What Steve writes about the exclusion from the U.S. radio airwaves and the U.S. tv screen during this "era of permanent war" of the voices of the folksingers of anti-war protest songs that he mentions,is the key moral issue that, I think, the U.S. media-music industry needs to now confront. Why should U.S. folk music fans who are into Woody Guthrie not eventually begin to challenge PBS or NPR's policy of not giving more airtime to the U.S. folksingers that Steve mentions and not televising events like the "Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash VI" for a New York City area audience?

If you've seen the new documentary about Alan Lomax, you'll notice that one of the proposals he made in the movie is that "cultural equity" for folk music fans and producers should now be provided by the U.S. mass media.

The kind of censorship that many younger U.S. folksingers are now experiencing in the 21st-century seems similar to the censorship situation that Woody Guthrie described 60 years ago in a July 15, 1946 letter:

"If your work gets to be labelled as communist or even as communistic or even as radically leaning in the general direction of bolshevism, then, of course, you are black balled, black listed, chalked up as a revolutionary bomb thrower, and you invite the whole weight of the capitalist machine to be thrown against you."