I am still waiting for Gary Rubinstein to post his brilliant and funny speech last night at the Skinny awards in Néw York City. These awards are conferred by Class Size Matters, the city’s leading voice for public education.

Fortunately, that great blogger G. F. Brandenburg transcribed Gary’s remarks here.

It is, as you will see, a hilarious riff on corporate reform rhetoric. The audience loved it. He hit the target.

Blogger Alexander Russo interpreted Gary’s remarks to mean that bloggers are the charter schools of the media. So he tweeted. But there is a big difference. The mainstream media, which Gary satirizes, are not publicly owned. They are private, for-profit enterprises. Dissenting from them is the vital role of bloggers, who create room for dissent and freedom of thought, who are free of corporate control and free to criticize the grand poohbahs and titans of the media.

Bloggers are indeed, as Gary said, incubators of innovation. They seek not to quash public institutions but to allow room for dissident voices to be heard in a world where profit and power dominate the media.