Pearl Jam's lyrics cut in webcast

A live internet broadcast of Pearl Jam's performance at Chicago's Lollapalooza music festival on Aug. 5 went off without a hitch–until singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush. Lyrics critical of the president didn't make it past editors of the show's webcast, the band complained. The performance, sponsored by AT&T Inc. and carried on AT&T's "Blue Room" site, omitted the lyrics "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush, find yourself another home" as part of a version of the song "Daughter," according to the Pearl Jam website. Fans had complained to the band about the possible censorship, the site said. "When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were, in fact, missing from the webcast and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them," the Pearl Jam site said. An AT&T spokeswoman confirmed the omission, saying that it had been a mistake made by someone working for the agency hired by AT&T to handle its Blue Room content. "We don't have a policy in place to censor," said AT&T's Tiffany Nels. "We have a policy on excessive profanity. This was an honest mistake. There was no censorship intended." Nels declined to name the agency in charge of the website content or elaborate on why an editor would cut out references to George Bush beyond saying, "We think it was just a little overzealous. It's not our policy to edit political commentary." While stopping short of calling the omission intentional censorship, the band's website said the incident "troubles us as artists, but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media." Critics of large internet providers like AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. and others seized on the incident as an example of why Congress should pass legislation to guarantee the freedom of Internet content from manipulation by the large corporations that provide Internet connectivity. Pearl Jam cited net neutrality as an issue. "If a company that is controlling a Webcast is cutting out bits of our performance"not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations"fans have little choice but to watch the censored version," the band said. "What happened to us this weekend was a wake-up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band."