A law blog points out why the police might want to re-think how they treat journalists: If you arrest student journalists and other journalists for doing their job, that will make them cover the police more critically in the future. If you arrest a photographer for "rioting" when he is in fact taking a photograph of the riot rather than participating in it, if you arrest a reporter for "rioting" when he is in fact standing in front of a camera reporting on the riot rather than participating in it, this will make that photographer or reporter less inclined in the future to believe the police when the police make accusations. After all, he now has personal experience with the police making a false accusation against him. So now he personally knows that police officers can and do lie. That has to color his future reporting. There is an old saying, "never argue with someone who buys paper by the truckload and ink by the barrel". Even in today's Internet-connected world that is still a wise saying.
- Badtux the Journalism Penguin
Of perhaps it will make future reporters more afraid of police, so they don't step outta line and don't challenge the powerful. That would be a winning strategy for the police.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't forget the media owners. Stories don't get run in newspapers, and especially TV, unless they're approved by higher-ups. Sure, you might have the occasional one-time piece if police beat down or shoot to death people who are loudly protesting something. Things that are too prominent to be ignored.
But the multi-part investigative series, where reporters have to be taken off their everyday, grind-out-the-content-to-fill-the-news-hole jobs and turned loose to connect dots and unearth broken bodies, that takes time. And taking time means spending money for the salary of some scribe who's not doing anything TODAY. Managing editors don't want to do that if they're of an authoritarian, corporatist mindset to begin with. And with corporate control, people who are long-haired, radical-talking nonconformists don't rise through the promotion ranks into positions of responsibility.
You have too rosy a view of journalists, Tux. You think they are what they're supposed to be. So did I, when I got my journalism degree and during the decade when I was a newspaper journo. I tried diligently to bust the chops of those in power, and I often got in trouble for it. I also watched how many boring drones were in the newz biz who were content to stenograph what was said in the city council meetings and police blotters. They didn't have the same zeal to, as some cat once said, "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." And it didn't hurt them one bit.
So yeah, Tux, it SHOULD be bad in the long run for police if they sow distrust by brutalising journalists. It might radicalise a few more who work for fringe publications and on blogs. (But do you think that police are looking at anything long-term? They just want to beat down some dirty goddamn hippies who are making trouble for them.) For the mainstream TV and newspaper types, who provide the sleeping sheeple with 97% of the news they swallow, I think the pigs' tactic will work just fine.
Bukko, believe me I know what "journalism" is like in today's Soviet America. You need to go back through my archives and look at my coverage of the "so-called press".
ReplyDeleteThe point, though... ah yes. Journalists tend to find ways to sneak what they view as truth inbetween the lines. Their editors might bury the lede, their editors may demand a certain slant, and so on and so forth, but as with Pravda and Tass you can often figure out what probably really happened if you're adept enough at reading between the lines. Granted, the average "reporter" nowdays could be replaced with a stenography machine and not be much of a loss...
As for the notion that police beat-downs of journalists will make journalists less likely to cover events where police action is likely to be, there's not much to say about that theory. Journalists go where they're sent by their editors, in the end.