Archive for the 'journalism' Category
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 by Josh Stearns
About five months ago, when the first of the big national banks began to buckle under their own weight, fanning the flames of the already smoldering economic crisis, a new idiom was born: “Too big to fail.”
Phrases like this are pure marketing genius. Meant to hint at fault (“oops, we probably should have been watching those banks a little more carefully”) and, at the same time, to reassure (“but don’t worry, we’ll fix it”) – what they do best is focus attention on one kind of problem while concealing another. Hidden behind the platitude of companies being “too big to fail” is the fact that our country – indeed, our democracy – is threatened by companies that are too big not to fail.
Over the past year, the newspapers, radio stations and TV channels that have been reporting on the economic crisis have been experiencing that crisis firsthand. In between the headlines of bank bailouts and auto company loans, the news of a news industry in crisis has been pushed below the fold. But while the crisis in our nation’s newsrooms has not topped lawmakers’ economic policy agendas it has been no less destructive to the national interest.
The massive media consolidation that began in the 1980s and escalated throughout the 1990s was often justified by Big Media executives as a way to cut costs and maximize profits for shareholders whose only measure of success was the bottom line, not the byline. This cost-cutting almost always meant job-cutting, and so, as Big Media companies got even bigger, their capacity to meet the needs of a changing nation shrank.
Fast forward to 2008: Amid the news of failing banks are numerous failing newspapers, a bankrupt Tribune Co., an indebted New York Times. Radio giant Clear Channel has been shedding stations and just announced it is cutting roughly 7 percent of its work force – the same percentage that TV conglomerate Viacom cut earlier in December.
The same sort of deregulatory policies that let Bank of America and Citigroup buy up local banks allowed companies like Tribune and Viacom to take over local stations and create a near-monopoly over the public’s airwaves. The same laissez-faire policies that fostered the financial crisis have left our media system unfit to adequately cover it.
There are many indications that this financial crisis was exacerbated by media that did not adequately fulfill their duty to hold the powerful accountable and to inform the public as the crisis unfolded. As they had with climate change and the war in Iraq, Big Media missed the boat.
For years, we have been saying that Big Media are a bad idea, and now, it would seem that even Big Media would agree. But the struggles facing Big Media do not mean success for media reformers. To be clear, Big Media is still very big, and where they are failing, that failure is hurting local communities and endangering democratic discourse and freedom of the press.
As Big Media companies shed employees, close local bureaus, replace investigative journalism and in-depth debate with shouting pundits and celebrity gossip, our communities are left with less local news and critical analysis of the issues facing us all. While Big Media may be too big to succeed, quality journalism truly is too big – that is to say, too important – to fail.
It’s time to stop the slide of our country’s media. We need a media system that invests in the kind of journalism that doesn’t just report on problems after they happen, but helps us understand them as they develop and even finds solutions. We need to shore up and support news that educates and informs, and to protect the newsgathering and analysis our communities need. We must realize that core national ideal of a free press that inspired the pluralistic, local and diverse media system our founders originally imagined.
But to get there, we need to revisit the deeply flawed policies that allowed Big Media to get so big in the first place. We need to say no to decades of deregulation run amok, to put a stop to the colossal mismanagement that brought us to this sorry state. We need to come together to establish policies that support new models, put journalists back to work, and fix our broken media system. The time is now, the need is urgent.
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Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 by Joe Torres
The journalism profession is in crisis, where every week brings another bleak announcement.The situation looks dire for the mainstream media industry, particularly for newspaper companies. Tribune Company, the third-largest newspaper chain in the nation and owner of 23 TV stations, declared bankruptcy. Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, announced it was slashing 2,000 jobs. Scripps put a “for sale” sign on The Rocky Mountain News, and the Miami Herald is reportedly on the block.
As I reported in another blog post in November, the newspaper industry has slashed more than 10 percent of its work force since 2000. And according to the running tally at the blog paper cuts, more than 15,000 newspaper positions have been eliminated through layoffs or buyouts in 2008.
The crisis in the media industry mirrors why our financial system is a mess. Big corporations pressured the government to deregulate industries. Companies got even bigger through mergers, controlling the major institutions that impact our lives with little oversight, facing less competition and refusing to innovate. Instead, companies obsessed over profit margins to please Wall Street while failing to serve the public interest. As these companies take on greater debt, they can’t pay back their loans — and workers get the ax.
Profits vs. the Public
It is true that profit margins have shrunk for some media companies, and the larger financial crisis undoubtedly impacts advertising. The Internet has changed the public’s media habits. But most media companies remain extremely profitable, just not profitable enough to please Wall Street. (Some papers in the now-gutted Gannett chain enjoy profit margins above 40 percent.)
“We know that newspapers are making money – just not the astronomical profits of the 1990s,” the National Association of Black Journalists said in a Dec. 5 press statement. “NABJ is reminding media companies of their sacred trust, which is more than the bottom-line. Never mind that media companies provide a private trust.”
The crisis has revealed how little media executives care about journalism or serving the public’s news and informational needs. It has also revealed how the government has utterly failed across party lines to protect the public by allowing for greater consolidation.
“As great newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and publishing houses dismember themselves around us, it would be marginally consoling if the pink slips were going to those who contributed so vigorously to their companies’ accelerating demise,” said Tina Brown in a post at the Daily Beast.
What Can Be Done?
Even though there is much to criticize about mainstream media, our nation needs the important work performed by journalists. The vast majority of journalists are motivated by the noble mission to keep the public informed about the world they live in.
But the current media crisis demonstrates that our nation’s reliance on corporate-funded journalism is failing us. While bloggers and online news sites are stepping in to fill the gaping hole left by the crash of our mainstream media, few can afford to fund long-term investigative journalism. As a result, fewer journalists are covering the critical institutions that affect us all, leaving the public more uniformed and vulnerable.
Now, more than ever, we need to roll back media consolidation. We need to make a greater investment in public and community media. And we need to figure out and support the models — private and public, corporate and independent, online and off, professional and amateur, local and international — that give us the news we need to hold our leaders accountable.
We also need to finally recognize that our media system is the result of policies and politics. Just like the weak-kneed watchdogs at the SEC and Treasury stood by as subprime lending and “credit default swaps” sank our economy, the public servants entrusted with the airwaves cheered deregulation as local voices and viewpoints were crushed by the now-tottering media behemoths.It didn’t have to be this way. And the next time the Zells and Gannetts come to Washington seeking special favors and massive giveaways, we ought to remember how we got into this mess. Too much “regulation” wasn’t the problem.
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Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 by Megan Tady
With thousands of journalists losing their jobs, how are the media filling all those column inches?
Press releases.
As media companies buy up more media outlets and slash newsroom budgets and staff, reporters have less time to do their jobs, often resorting to writing entire stories based on a press release alone, and sometimes printing stories that mirror an organization or agency’s exact press statement.
It seems actual reporting is becoming something of an anomaly, and especially in science coverage, according to ongoing analysis by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Charles Petit, a veteran science reporter who runs the Tracker, has found an alarming number of newspapers running stories based only on press releases.
“What is distressing to me is that the number of science reporters and the variety of reporting is going down. What does come out is more and more the direct product of PR shops,” Charles Petit told the Columbia Journalism Review.
Press releases should used as a tip, or a starting point, to begin investigating a story. Crafting questions, finding holes in data, reaching beyond the press contact – that’s where the true journalism lies. As Petit told CJR, science news “spoon-fed” to reporters via press releases “become a powerful subversive tool eroding the chance that reporters will craft their own stories.”
What’s worse, many newspapers aren’t fessing up to their press release plagiarization, leaving readers unaware that the story they’re reading came straight from the pen of a PR flack.
While Petit is monitoring science journalism, the practice of presenting fake news as as the real thing has infiltrated local television news across the country.
A 2006 investigation by Free Press and the Center for Media and Democracy revealed that stations are slipping corporate-sponsored “video news releases” — promotional segments designed to look like objective news reports — into their regular news programming. This deception is illegal under FCC rules.
A series of CMD investigations have caught 113 local stations airing the so-called VNRs without proper disclosure. Free Press and CMD have filed complaints with the FCC, urging the agency to take action against all stations that have violated sponsorship identification rules. So far, the FCC has fined only one cable channel for airing fake news.
And just why have television stations resorted to airing VNRs? Runaway media consolidation has squeezed TV newsrooms, too, which are trying to fill more hours with fewer reporters.
If we want to stop junk journalism, we need to start at the top with the owners of our media.
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Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 by Joe Torres
The news keeps getting worse for newspaper journalists and the communities that depend on their daily papers for local coverage. Across the country, newspapers are trying to maintain their high profit margins by slashing newsroom jobs and news coverage.Last month, the Star-Ledger, the largest newspaper in New Jersey, became the latest paper to scale back its newsroom operation. The paper announced plans to lay off 40 percent of its staff. The Los Angeles Times laid off another 75 journalists. Since 2001, the Los Angeles Times has gutted its newsroom, cutting staff from 1,200 to 660. Gannett, a company that owns 85 daily newspapers, said it would lay off 10 percent – or 3,000 – of its newspaper employees. Meanwhile, Time Warner Inc., the world’s largest magazine publisher, plans to lay off 600, or 6 percent, of its magazine employees.
Dean Singleton, the CEO of Media News Group, one of the largest newspaper owners in the country, recently told a publishing group that he may consolidate copy-editing desks at his 54 newspapers to one location to cut expenses. He is even entertaining the possibility of moving all copy-editing operations overseas, something at least two other publications have already begun doing.
While my heart goes out to all the journalists who have lost their jobs and to the communities being affected by reduced news coverage, it is hard to feel sorry for the newspaper industry, where greed and profit have led to the situation we see today.
Astonishing Cuts
Over the past year, newsrooms have been bleeding journalism jobs. UNITY: Journalists of Color reported recently that an astonishing 2,415 newsroom jobs have been lost since September 15. The Project for Excellence in Journalism estimates that newspapers have cut about 10 percent of newsroom jobs — 5,500 positions — this decade.
The latest announcements come as newspaper circulation and ad revenue continue to slide. A recent Audit Bureau of Circulations report found that circulation for daily newspapers dropped close to 5 percent over a six-month period that ended in September 2008. Newspapers in larger cities have been the hardest hit. Circulation at the Los Angeles Times fell by 5 percent; the Chicago Tribune, 7.7 percent; the Boston Globe, 10.1 percent; The Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 percent; the Philadelphia Daily News, 13.2 percent; and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, 13.6 percent.
Meanwhile, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) expects total ad revenue for the industry to drop by 11.5 percent this year.
Greed and Profit
The Internet has transformed the media industry and how the public consumes news. More people are reading their local newspapers online than ever before. Online ad revenue grew for 17 straight quarters until its recent decline. Nevertheless, the NAA expects online ad revenue to continue its growth next year.
Despite the changing industry, newspapers remain extremely profitable. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) reported that the average pre-tax profit margin for newspapers was 18.5 percent in 2007. Some newspaper profits remained above 20 percent. “The industry remains profitable, but it has come time to take the ‘obscenely’ out of that commonplace observation,” PEJ said in its annual State of the News Media report.
But the majority of newspapers are publicly traded companies for which any decline in profits is unacceptable. As a result, newspapers are trying to please Wall Street by axing jobs and scaling back coverage.
With fewer reporters on the beat — and less quality local coverage — it’s no wonder people aren’t subscribing to the paper. While these cuts may please stock analysts, they harm the public. There are fewer journalists covering the business of government at city halls and state capitals across the country. Media companies are closing their Washington and foreign bureaus, while the number of lobbyists pushing the legislation agendas of their corporate clients at the local, state and national levels has increased under the diminishing watchdog eye of the Fourth Estate.
Failure to Adapt
What is rarely discussed is that media consolidation and a lack of leadership within the newspaper industry have resulted in the newspaper industry contributing to its revenue decline.
Too many executives were slow to embrace the Internet as part of their newspapers’ business models. It was just last year that PEJ reported that mainstream media had began to show a serious commitment to growing online ad revenue.
Media consolidation has also resulted in a handful of newspaper chains that are owned by publicly traded companies. Major chains like Times Mirror and Knight Ridder were swallowed up in recent years by other chains. Companies like Tribune and Media News are reducing their staff to pay off their debt for going on a merger spree.
To help ease their debt burden, the industry has turned to the FCC to bail them out by deregulating the industry to allow newspapers to purchase a TV or radio station in the same market, a station that has most likely maintained “obscenely” high profit margins. Last year, the FCC voted to lift the newspaper-broadcast cross- ownership regulation that helped to protect media diversity, competition and localism for more than 30 years. The proposed new rules include gaping loopholes that would allow for consolidation in potentially every media market in this country. The new rules are currently being challenged in court.
If upheld, journalists should expect more layoffs, and the public should see a declining commitment to news as newspapers take on greater debt to please their Wall Street investors.
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Monday, October 27th, 2008 by Craig Aaron
The United States of America — land of the free, home of the First Amendment — is supposed to be a beacon for the rest of the world. So where do we stand in the latest global rankings of press freedom?Thirty-sixth.That’s not a typo. It’s a national disgrace.
The Press Freedom Index released last week by Reporters Without Borders reflects both the freedoms journalists enjoy as well as the “efforts made by the authorities to respect and ensure respect for this freedom.” The annual rankings examine the way that financial pressures lead to self-censorship in the press, government abuses of the press, as well as murders, imprisonment and physical abuse of journalists.
While there are currently no jailed journalists in America, Reporters Without Borders said there are many concerns about the U.S. media.
“Journalists are guardians of democracy whose rights must be protected around the world, not least in the United States, to which emerging democracies look for guidance, and where free speech is an inalienable right explicitly protected by the Constitution,” Reporters Without Borders declared. “This situation is unacceptable for the country known for its First Amendment rights.”
The rights of journalists to freely operate came under attack just two months ago when nearly 100 journalists were arrested and detained in St. Paul, Minn., while trying to report on the Republican National Convention. But this is only one blatant example of America’s eroding press freedoms.
This year, we also discovered a covert and extensive Pentagon propaganda plan that used the press to sway Americans’ support for the Iraq War and the war on terrorism. Deploying what the Pentagon called “message force multipliers” throughout TV, radio and print, the government tried to pass off well-coached pundits as unbiased military analysts. It’s hard to know who came out worse in this scandal: the Pentagon pundits or the media that blindly booked them again and again — no questions asked.
The media’s epic failure in the run-up to the war has been well-documented — and a few major outlets have even issued apologies for their coverage. But we’re just beginning to see the fallout from years of relentless rah-rah coverage of Wall Street, even as the writing was on the wall about an impending collapse. And we haven’t even mentioned the mostly atrocious election coverage or recited stump speeches we call “presidential debates.”
Worse yet, the same pundits who have been so colossally wrong time and again keep yapping away. There are, of course, a few courageous and diligent reporters who dared to question the conventional wisdom. But you won’t find them on TV every night.
All of this is directly connected to runaway media consolidation. Our major news outlets are controlled by just a handful of big corporations, which have the power to set the news agenda and shift the focus from real issues to the kind of celebrity-ridden, gaffe-obsessed, lipstick-on-a-terrorist chatter that now passes for political discourse. And the mantra of “deregulation” has been as bad for the media as it’s been for our financial institutions.
And it’s just a matter of time before the current financial meltdown becomes the pretext for even more consolidation, layoffs, slashed reporting budgets and “news you can use.” Yet somehow every time these companies come to Washington with their hands out, no one asks them if there just might be a connection between all the cutbacks — trimming content, canning veteran journalists, shuttering foreign bureaus, replacing real reporting with mindless commentary — and their lower ratings and shrinking audiences.
Reporters Without Borders, too, noted the harmful effects of media consolidation on press freedom, pointing out the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to gut media ownership limits, allowing one company to own both a major daily newspaper and broadcast station in the same market. Reports Without Borders observed the negative impact this would have on news diversity and the ability to “protect a free, independent and diverse media pool.”
Reporters Without Borders also singled out the uncertain future of the Internet as another central concern, and called for concrete policies that would protect press freedom online. The organization lambasted phone and cable companies’ efforts to dismantle the long-standing principle of “Net Neutrality,” which stops companies from discriminating against online content.
“The practice of charging fees for different access speeds for broadband Internet connection undermines the right of people to be informed. Net neutrality is the core concept that has made the Internet the open media forum it is, and it must be protected,” the group said, calling on both candidates and the U.S. Congress to pass laws protecting the open Internet.
To protect press freedom, we must make better media policies. For too long, the decisions that shape everything we see, read and hear have been made behind closed doors by corporate lobbyists and their cronies. It’s time for all Americans to have a seat at the table and a voice in this debate. This is a fight that must be joined by everyday citizens, civil libertarians and working journalists alike.
As we enter a new year and a new administration, the report from Reporters Without Borders is a clarion call for America to take a hard look at how we are meeting the information needs of our communities and upholding the values of the Constitution.
This post was co-authored by Josh Stearns.
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Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 by Megan Tady
Over the next week, a carload of independent journalists will be winding their way through the South, perhaps one of the only caravans of media-makers not pounding the worn campaign trail. Are they on a beat? You could say that.
Six journalists from different regions across the country and varying media backgrounds have embarked on the first Grassroots Media Justice Tour, billed as an “exciting movement-building opportunity.” Kicking off last week in North Carolina, the tour is making pit stops in thirteen cities and towns, ending Oct. 22 in Denton, Texas.
Jordan Flaherty, editor of Left Turn, said the tour was designed as an organizing project to highlight the intersection of journalism and grassroots activism through workshops and performances.
“We need to look at all the different ways we can reach each other,” he said. “For the print publications on this tour, they’re at conferences and on the Internet, but that’s not the way to meet people. A lot of people aren’t at conferences. Maybe they don’t have bookstores near them. They’re not on various e-mail networks. To be able to directly reach people is another way to do it.”
The tour is sponsored by Left Turn, ColorLines, Bitch, $pread, Free Speech Radio News, make/shift, and other radical and independent media projects from around the United States. Flaherty is joined on the tour by media makers Hadassah Hill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Puck Lo, Jen Angel, and Jesse Muhammad.One of the primary functions of the tour is to “get information out” about social justice struggles. In the face of massive media consolidation, where diverse and independent voices are stifled, Flaherty said reaching people requires creativity.
“It’s really challenging to get voices out in this monopoly marketplace with Fox owning MySpace and Google owning YouTube,” he said. “They’re branching out to these new media areas. As technology changes, corporations are very dynamically adept at changing. The forms for getting our voices out – technology opens up new forms – but then corporate control keeps closing up those forms. So we have to be really dynamic and adaptive to deal with that.”
The second goal of the tour is to build relationships between grassroots activists and independent media – a connection that Flaherty said was vital in telling the story of the Jena 6 case when the mainstream media was mum.
And as independent media struggle with postal rate hikes, increased publishing costs, and an Internet landscape that doesn’t encourage people to pay for content, the question of how to get people to fund quality journalism is present on the tour.
“We are talking to people about really valuing media,” Flaherty said. “I think all of our movements are in crisis. And I think this nonprofit industrial complex is part of it. We’ve really sort of forgotten how to fund our own movements and not really relying on grants and others sorts of funding. We’re seeing that grants can be really unreliable. Funding can drop out at a moment’s notice – it can be unsustainable, it can be unpredictable.”
Yet in a time of crisis for both journalism and the country, Flaherty said the tour is offering some inspiration. “It’s great to be out here and connecting with people to see the different work people are doing,” he said.
Flaherty said the tour could be even more impactful if it had wider funding and support. “We’re very grassroots and just scraping by,” he said.
To find out more about the tour or to make a donation, contact Jordan Flaherty at neworleans@leftturn.org .
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 by Megan Tady
Journalists arrested during the Republican National Convention breathed a sigh of relief last Friday – local authorities in St. Paul announced they would not prosecute them.
The announcement comes as welcome news for journalists, media organizations and citizens who launched a national public outcry to drop the charges against the arrested journalists. But many questions still remain about what appeared to be a planned attack against journalists and free speech during the RNC.
“We still need answers about why and how journalists got swept up in these arrests in the first place,” said Nancy Doyle Brown from Twin Cities Media Alliance. “And more than anything else, we need to ensure that this never happens again. We’ll never know how many important stories never got told because their authors were behind bars, not in the streets.”
Nearly two dozen reporters were arrested during the four-day event, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and two of her producers, Associated Press reporters, student journalists, and local TV photographers.
Other journalists were pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were held at gunpoint during a “pre-emptive” police raid aimed at disrupting protesters. The press release from St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s office noted that the city’s attorney will use a “broad definition and verification to identify journalists who were caught up in mass arrests during the convention.”
Some of the most compelling and important reporting from the RNC came from independent journalists outside the Xcel Center. It’s vital that all journalists can operate without fear of intimidation or repression.
“We’re pleased that the St. Paul authorities ultimately acted to uphold the rights of all journalists — including those citizens using blogs, cheap cameras and cell phones to report news as it happens,” said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, the national media reform organization. “Our task now is to ensure that our press remains free to report on the events, issues and stories that matter to our country, our communities, and our democracy.”
Less than three days after the initial arrests, more than 60,000 people across the country signed on to a letter from Free Press, demanding that Mayor Coleman and local authorities immediately “free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them.” These letters were delivered to St. Paul City Hall the day after the convention following a press conference that included local citizens and many of the journalists who had been arrested earlier in the week.
“The news from St. Paul City Hall is certainly welcome regarding the decision to drop charges against journalists who were arrested and cited during the RNC,” said Mike Bucsko, executive officer of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild, who spoke at the press conference. “However, it is essential the elected officials in St. Paul and Ramsey County examine the circumstances that led to the needless detention and harassment of journalists to ensure this type of indiscriminate behavior on the part of law enforcement does not happen again.”
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Monday, September 8th, 2008 by Tim Karr
Journalists and St. Paul citizens assembled outside St. Paul City Hall Friday to deliver more than 60,000 letters to Mayor Chris Coleman and prosecuting attorneys demanding that they immediately drop charges against all journalists arrested this week as they covered the Republican National Convention.
By Friday morning, dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers had been booked by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office in what appears to have been an orchestrated round-up of media makers covering protests during the convention.”
From the pre-convention raids to the ongoing harassment and arrests of journalists, these have been dark days for press freedom in the United States,” said Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, who delivered the letters on behalf of the nonpartisan media reform group Free Press.
Stories That Will Never Be Told
She was joined by a crowd of local activists and journalists, including Amy Goodman and Nicole Salazar of Democracy Now!, KFAI-FM radio host Andy Driscoll and Mike Bucsko, executive director of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild.”
Tragically, there are stories that the world needed to hear this week that will never be told,” Brown said. “They won’t be told because reporters working on them were sitting in the back of squad cars, were stripped of their cameras, or were face down on the pavement with their hands cuffed behind their backs.”
On Thursday, the final night of the convention, it appears that authorities ratcheted up their attacks on both protesters and credentialed journalists, lobbing tear gas and percussion grenades into crowds and arresting student journalists, local TV photographers, Associated Press reporters, and two MyFox journalists, among others.
Other journalists have also been pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were held at gunpoint during a “pre-emptive” raid aimed at disrupting protesters last weekend.
Mayor Chris Coleman has refused to reply to my repeated calls and e-mails asking for his response to allegations that journalists were specifically targeted by authorities.
Post-Mortem
A crowd of journalists — many of whom were arrested earlier in the week — entered City Hall and delivered the letters into the hands of St. Paul Deputy Mayor Ann Mulholland and City Attorney John Choi, who briefly told them that the legal system will sort out their concerns.
The mayor and public officials “need to do a post-mortem to examine the circumstances” of these arrests, said Bucsko, who represents reporters at the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I hate to think that journalists were being targeted,” adding that it appeared that “there was discrimination based upon their jobs.”
The signatures were collected in less than 72 hours as people nationwide expressed their outrage over St. Paul’s attempts to stifle the many journalists documenting events surrounding the tightly scripted spectacle in the city’s Xcel Center.
Wellstone’s Worst Nightmare
Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, The Newspaper Guild, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporters Without Borders, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Writers Guild of America, East have also sounded the alarm over the unusually harsh treatment by city authorities.”
The city of St. Paul has a black eye right now, and I must say that Paul Wellstone would be rolling in his grave,” said Denis Moynihan of Free Speech TV, who spoke outside City Hall today.”
Mayor Coleman must salvage the damaged reputation of the state and the city by dropping charges against all journalists immediately.”
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Friday, September 5th, 2008 by Megan Tady
Police have been rounding up, detaining and arresting journalists throughout the week at the Republican National Convention. But tens of thousands of people across the nation have responded with demands to protect free speech.
This morning, local advocates and independent journalists delivered more that 60,000 letters to St. Paul City Hall calling on Mayor Chris Coleman and local law enforcement officials to drop all charges against journalists arrested while covering protests outside the Republican National Convention.
The signatures were garnered in less than two days as people expressed their outrage over St. Paul’s attempts to stifle independent journalists documenting what’s happening outside the highly orchestrated activities and speeches in the Xcel Center.
Journalists have been widely targeted during the four days of the convention. On Monday, local law enforcement officials arrested Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and two producers from her show, Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke, and several independent videographers while they were covering protests outside the RNC. The Democracy Now! crew has been released but still faces serious charges.Other independent journalists have also been pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were even held at gunpoint during a “pre-emptive” raid aimed at disrupting protesters.
On Thursday, the final night of the convention, it appears that authorities ratcheted up their attacks on both protesters and credentialed journalists, lobbing tear gas and percussion grenades into crowds and arresting student journalists, local photographers, Associated Press reporters, and two MyFox journalists, among others.”
From the first [smoke] bomb until the time when they herded everyone onto the bridge was about 15 minutes,” said MyFox national editor John P. Wise in an article on MyFox.com. “They cuffed me, took the [press] credential off me, checked my pockets. I was told a couple of different times that they were going to let [the media] go … but then I saw they were tagging my camera bag.”
The letters delivered today demands that Mayor Coleman and local authorities immediately “free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them.” This call has been echoed by groups the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, The Newspaper Guild, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporters Without Borders, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Writers Guild of America, East.
Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, who helped present the letters, expressed her frustration and anger over the treatment of journalists.”
The targeting and harassment of journalists that we’ve seen during the RNC sends the message that the Twin Cities don’t value the essential role that journalists play in a democracy,” she said. “From the pre-convention raids to the ongoing harassment and arrests of journalists, these have been dark days for press freedom in the United States. We’re bringing Mayor Coleman more than 50,000 letters from people across the nation demanding that all charges pending against these journalists be dropped.”
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Friday, September 5th, 2008 by Tim Karr
In St. Paul this week, a new generation of media makers is under assault by the city’s mayor and law enforcement officers.
These local officials think freedom of the press extends only to their allies in mainstream media.For the rest of us, practicing journalism is a crime.
While reports of brutal police arrests and home invasions are still coming in, by Tuesday night the picture became clear. Dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers had been arrested in an orchestrated round up of independents covering the Republican National Convention.
Targeting the New Press
The list of those detained ranges from the well-known (Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman) and well-established (Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke) — to the bootstrapping bloggers and video makers who are covering local protests for TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness and other outlets.
Police — with firearms drawn — raided a meeting of the video journalists and arrested independent media, bloggers and videomakers. Journalists covering protests have been pointed out by authorities, blasted with tear gas and pepper spray, and brutalized while in custody.
Democracy Now’s Goodman reports that a U.S. Secret Service agent ripped her press credentials from her neck the moment she identified herself to him as a member of the media. Her producers emerged yesterday from their jail cells bloodied and scarred, reporting unusually harsh treatment at the hands of local and federal authorities.
Mayor Coleman’s Silence
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman hasn’t responded to repeated phone and e-mail requests for comments on the targeting of journalists. Instead he praised the work of Police Chief John Harrington and painted those arrested as a small band of outsiders and vandals intent upon committing felonies against the good people of his city.
In less than a day, more than 35,000 people have signed a letter from Free Press (my employer) to Mayor Coleman condemning the arrests and demanding that he and local prosecutors immediately “free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them.”
But when Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald pressed Harrington and Coleman to respond to widespread reports of journalist arrests, Harrington claimed ignorance while Coleman stood silent at his side.Police spokesman Don Walsh intervened only to say that “arrest have been made” and that all those arrested were involved in criminal activities and not “simply non-participants.”
Strib Forgets About Free Speech
In a bizarre editorial on Tuesday, the Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune hailed the police crackdown as “appropriate,” blaming unrest on outsiders from beyond the Twin Cities.”Many of those arrested in St. Paul weren’t carrying IDs or wouldn’t give their names. Those who were identified came from Lexington, Ky.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; Portland, Ore., and dozens of other U.S. cities,” they wrote. “These weren’t the sons and daughters of Highland Park and south Minneapolis.”
The Star Tribune itself is owned by out-of-towners from Avista Capital Partners, a New York City private equity firm specializing in energy, healthcare and media investments.
Other than a brief story about Goodman’s arrest, the paper has failed to report on the apparent targeting of independent reporters, even though groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have sounded the alarm.
Sweeping Real Journalism Under the Carpet
Here we have every indication of an orchestrated assault by federal and local law enforcement agencies to stifle independent sources of information. As shocking as this conduct is, more disturbing is the fact that the mayor’s office and the local daily seem so unconcerned.
It’s not difficult to understand why. With local leaders making every effort to roll out the welcome mat for mainstream media and the GOP, they’d rather sweep beneath the carpet those pesky independents who are showing us a side of the spectacle that is less scripted for prime time.
As an elected representative, Mayor Coleman should take a stand on behalf of a free press, rein in aggressive and violent tactics by local law enforcement, stop the targeting of journalists and immediately drop all charges against them.
As a powerful news organization, the Star Tribune should know better, and should be sticking up for a free press, regardless of the form it takes.
For now, the democratic spirit of journalism is alive not in the Star Tribune newsroom, but among the video-blogs and cellphone reports that are bubbling up from outside the convention.This editorial was originally published on HuffingtonPost on September 3.
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