Tuesday, October 18, 2016

When is a journalist, not a journalist?


                                        Good Day World!

Today's big question: When is a journalist, not a journalist?

The answer, it seems, is when Ladd Erickson, a prosecutor for Morton County, North Dakota, says a person is not a journalist...in his opinion.

When asked to explain the grounds for arresting a working journalist (Amy Goodman), Erickson told the Grand Forks Herald that HE DID NOT, in fact, consider Goodman a journalist!

"She's a protestor, basically," Erickson claimed.

From Common Dreams Website:

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to contemplate the full and chilling absurdity of this statement: 

"According to Erickson, a woman who appeared at a protest carrying a microphone emblazoned with the name Democracy Now! and trailing a video crew; who can be heard in the resulting video report identifying herself to a security guard as a reporter; and who then broadcast the video on the daily news program she has hosted for 20 years is not actually a journalist.

She is not a journalist, because she harbors a strong perspective, and that perspective clashes with his own. By the same distorted logic, every muckraking news gatherer from Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair on through I.F. Stone, and, yes, today’s Matt Taibbi (whose work Erickson apparently admires) was not a journalist but an activist flirting with arrest."

Before Goodman came to the main protest site, the Sacred Stone Spirit Camp, no one else covered the story. 

Not a single one of the major American broadcast networks had sent a reporter to cover the protest. It wasn't even mentioned on the air.

Goodman walked into the Morton-Mandan Combined Law and Corrections Center and turned herself in to the local authorities yesterday.

Her crime - unflinching journalism.

The charge: Riot, a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine.

So, to be clear; Goodman came to an active protest, and with her film crew, she covered it and is now being blamed for the protest.

Something stinks in North Dakota when authorities try to suppress journalists from doing their job based upon one man's opinion of who is a journalist...and who is not a journalist.

Of course there's more than just one man trying to break up the protests - there's a giant energy corporation (Energy Transfer Partners)  bankrolled by 37 banks behind these actions.

This is just another example of a big corporation raping resources to make a profit. Here's what you need to know about what's happening in Standing Rock.

10/18/16 BREAKING NEWS''Riot'' Charges Against Amy Goodman Dismissed in Press Freedom Victory

Related: Standing Rock Pipeline Fight Draws Hundreds To North Dakota Plains

Time for me to walk on down the road...

3 comments:

Glenn Franco Simmons said...

Amazingly shortsighted and an assault on our First Amendment rights. She ought to sue the oil-soaked shorts off the arrester. Good column, Boss!

ImBlogCrazy said...

Thanks Glenn!

Glenn Franco Simmons said...

sure thing!

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