Tonight PEN will honor Nay Phone Latt, a young Burmese blogger who is serving a twelve-year sentence in a remote and harsh prison for using his blog and the Rangoon Internet cafés he owned to spread news about the street demonstrations that peacefully challenged Burma’s military regime in 2007. I wanted to meet Nay Phone Latt when I travelled to Burma in early 2008, but he’d already been arrested. I met other young bloggers, journalists, and activists who knew him. They were almost painfully earnest and idealistic. They believed that their movement, because it was largely leaderless and decentralized, like the Web itself, would be more durable, harder to crush, than earlier democratic movements. They had heard of Foucault, and one blogger spoke of a postmodern opposition. Since then, many of those young Burmese have been jailed, for years and even decades; others have fled the country. Foucault has turned out to be no more help to the beleaguered Burmese than any of his predecessors.

It’s well and right for PEN to honor Nay Phone Latt, and through him all the Nay Phone Latts in Burma. In years to come, if history and struggle allow them to go from being pariahs, convicts, and exiles to taking their rightful place as leaders in Burma, they will say how much it meant that organizations like PEN remembered and recognized them during their darkest years. This is what political prisoners and oppressed dissidents—Havel, Mandela—always say once they’ve emerged into the sunlight and give interviews and write books and travel abroad to receive awards. But Nay Phone Latt won’t be in New York tonight. For the Burmese opposition, these are the darkest years.

It isn’t completely fair to couple Nay Phone Latt in the same post with Mike Allen, but the comparison is instructive and in some ways inevitable. Allen, who writes Politico’s daily Playbook column, is the subject of a profile by Mark Leibovich in Sunday’s Times Magazine, which presents him as the most influential journalist in Washington, the guy everyone in the political class has to read. What does Mike Allen do? Mainly, he reads what everyone else in the Washington media world writes; then he selects it and condenses it at a predawn hour so that all the other chronically underslept workaholics in the capital turn to Playbook before anything else in order to armor themselves for the day ahead. The profile portrays Allen as singularly, obsessively driven—no wife, no kids, no known address, no known vices (he is an ardent Christian), bad diet, physically and emotionally elusive, evasive about his life and background (his father turns out to have been a pamphleteer for the John Birch Society in the sixties and seventies), widely liked, generous with his countless friends, sprinkling his column with birthday greetings and shout outs to the many stars in the Washington firmament.

And yet, the thousands of words in Leibovich’s vivid and revealing piece somehow don’t persuasively explain what Allen does—what accounts for his supreme importance. Reading Playbook, as I’ve been doing lately, doesn’t explain it, either. He is, in essence, an aggregator. He summarizes the morning papers, forecasts the day’s big events, quotes snippets from upcoming testimony, scores the news cycle’s winners and losers, relays the views of various spokesmen, party reps, public officials, financial titans, and, of course, fellow journalists. Playbook is a daily service for the powerful, and Allen—by Leibovich’s portrayal, and by the lights of his own writing—is an extremely serviceable fellow. The fact that he doesn’t choose sides, that Playbook is a favorite outlet for Dick Cheney as well as a must-read for the Obama White House, is part of his serviceability. Allen hums along in an endless feedback loop with his friends, acquaintances, colleagues, subjects, and sources (they are pretty much interchangeable, and they include Leibovich) in the world of Washington power. He’s a clipping service and a kind of higher gossip columnist; he feeds and feeds off the twenty-four-hour news cycle, where there is no depth or breadth, no long view, no content to issues, no reality outside the game. In this sense, Leibovich is right to have lionized Allen as the prototype of cutting-edge political media. But because Leibovich and everyone else in the story lives and works inside the same loop as Allen, any reader looking for critical analysis will find it only in one short quote by Mark Salter, John McCain’s former aide, who says of Politico: “They have taken every worst trend in reporting, every single one of them, and put them on rocket fuel…. It’s the shortening of the news cycle. It’s the trivialization of news. It’s the gossipy nature of news. It’s the self-promotion.”

In the inner circle of the inner circle of American journalism, no one is right or wrong, politics has no bearing on life, and nothing lasts longer than a day. Meanwhile, in a prison in eastern Burma, twenty-nine-year-old Nay Phone Latt is in the second year of a twelve-year prison sentence because he took seriously what we, in our vast freedom, no longer know how to.