– Blowing apart the meme that free speech is being suppressed due to journalist arrests:
Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who’ve been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional “objective” news organizations; others work for “non-objective” news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader.
Yes, Alternet and Indypendent Reader, two lefty websites, the latter which comes across more as activism (replete with glowing reports of #OWS) than an actual media website. The presupposition you’re supposed to share as a reader of their memes is that every single arrested journalist was the antithesis of Natasha Lennard. If the hyper-fellation of this movement in the press is any indication–as well as the press’s blatant obfuscation of the rapes, shootings, etc. therein–it’s not a leap of logic to assume that other members of lefty media sites perhaps crossed the line of observation-to-participation like Lennard.
Now consider this: the Society for Professional Journalists statement.
The number of journalists arrested at Occupy Wall Street has now reached six (there may be more), but the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has had enough. It is publicly denouncing the arrests of those covering all Occupy protests and is demanding that Michael Bloomberg and city officials from across the country drop the charges against detained reporters.
Funny: According to SPJ’s own bylaws, some of those arrested might not even qualify for membership within the group. For whom are they speaking? The couple of AP photogs arrested? When the cops order you to get out of the way your media cred doesn’t recuse you from following the law. The press can be aggressive to the point where they ignore the physical safety of others, even presidential primary candidates. Why have some media present at the exact same locations not been cuffed whereas a couple others were? The futile attempt to argue this as an attack on the press only underscores further media bias.
I’m willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt, but they can’t rage “against” the machine after being its lapdog for fifty years, all while expecting public sympathy. If they want to be truly revolutionary, they’ll pull a Steve Kroft and stick a camera in Nancy Pelosi’s face while asking her how she came in to that Visa IPO or maybe set up shop in the DOJ while Holder fidgets under Fast and Furious scrutiny.
– Remember when MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer freaked out over this? Will MSNBC breathlessly report on the firearms at OWS? Will they report on the shootings already happening? Or the other crimes?
– AOL/Huffington Post is hemorrhaging talent:
At least three top names from the company have departed this month, including Brad Garlinghouse, head of the company’s Silicon Valley office, who quit last week. Mr Garlinghouse’s departure came on the same day that Sarah Lacy, a senior writer at TechCrunch, said she was leaving, and just days after Saul Hansell, a former New York Times reporter who was a senior editor at the Huffington Post, quit his job.
HLN has confirmed that it has decided not to renew Joy Behar’s talk show.
The series staring the co-host of “The View,” which debuted in September 2009, will leave the cable news network’s schedule in mid-December.
“I am very proud of the show that we created at HLN, and I owe tremendous thanks to the show team who made it possible,” Behar said in a statement.
The show’s time slot being filled by one of HLN’s “current programs,” a network release said.
– Politico: James O’Keefe’s plans derailed by infighting and funding problems. O’Keefe’s envious former colleagues should learn that you never build yourself up by tearing others down. In fact, there are a lot of conservatives who could learn from this. When your ambition to “make it” aligns you with progressives against the conservative movement you’re claiming to help, you’ve already lost.
– More on Tina Brown and the Newsweek trainwreck.
– AP to reporters: “don’t break the news by Tweeting.”
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