As most Kossacks are aware, Amy Goodman and two of her producers at Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report were arrested in St. Paul as part of the calculatedly excessive use of a paramilitarized police force at the Republican National Convention last week.
A tough, courageous and confrontational reporter for two decades, Goodman can be seen being arrested in this widely viewed video:
Goodman wrote later about what happened:
Like what happened to "Democracy Now!" producer Nicole Salazar, videotaping protests in downtown St. Paul. She was violently forced to the ground, her nose bloodied, was held down with a man’s knee or boot on her back, with another person pulling on her leg. Fellow producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous was thrown against a wall and kicked in the chest and back. The police might normally intervene and arrest the perpetrators. Except here, it was the police who were the assailants. And they arrested their victims. Arriving on the scene, I tried to have my colleagues freed, as we were all accredited journalists, and the police arrested me. And we were not the only ones.
In fact, 45 members of the media were arrested, according to Anna Pratt of the Minnesota Independent.
Many Daily Kos Diarists also wrote about the police behavior, as did Contributing Editor McJoan here. Glenn Greenwald had good takes here, here and here. The folks at The Uptake had some outstanding coverage, as did Firedoglake. The arrests of Goodman and her crew even got quite a bit of coverage from the traditional print media, including the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
Hunt around and you can see plenty of stuff like this of a totally non-threatening woman being pepper-sprayed in the face at close range by one of St. Paul's finest. And then he does it again.
As you can see from the accompanying interview of Chuck Samuelson of the Minnesota American Civil Liberties Union, the Republican National Convention was a "full employment project" for the ACLU for 18 months. But, as he makes clear, what happened in St. Paul was not just a product of one administration or one political party but a bipartisan effort to suppress dissent that began well before September 11.
In our era of 24/7 outrages committed by war criminals and other scofflaws exercising state power, such petty annoyances as pre-emptive strikes against protesters - the domestic version of the Bush Doctrine - and arrests of working journalists scroll quickly out of sight and out of mind. With a watershed election speeding toward us, it's tempting to pass off as "old news" something that happened a whole 10 days ago.
Matters are not so simple for those on the front lines. Top-ranking reporters and commentators from big media organizations with legal clout and the ability to snag friendly interviews with vice presidential candidates aren't very likely to wind up in the paddy wagon the way Goodman and her crew did. They aren't as apt to ask challenging questions either, whether of the candidates or of the police themselves, much less of government officials who keep chip chip chipping away at the 1st Amendment rights of both journalists and rank-and-file Americans.
Goodman and the others from Democracy Now! were released. But they still must answer to both misdemeanors and felonies for exercising their rights as journalists, busted on trumped-up or fabricated charges. As the megamedia becomes ever more mega, concentrated in fewer and fewer corporate hands, attacks on independent journalists, the ones who don't get first (or last) dibs on interviews with the Sarah Palins of the world, pinch our ability to know what the government and the plutocrats who control large swaths of it are doing.
Thanks to the efforts of local Minnesota groups including the local Newspaper Guild, the reporters' union, some 60,000 people have signed petitions seeking the dismissal of the misdemeanor charges against Goodman and the felony charges against her producers. But legal fights cost money, and Democracy Now! is not exactly rolling in cash. Then, too, news coverage itself ain't cheap.
Democracy Now! may not be your idea of the perfect alternative to the corporate news media, just as Air America has its faults. You may have a few objections to the coverage you see there if you are lucky enough to hear or see the program's broadcasts. I know I do. But that, I think, is quibbling. In a world like the one we saw unfold in the streets of St. Paul, not to mention in the hall where the Republican National Convention itself took place, it's essential to remember that media are plural and one of our tasks as good, dissenting citizens is to keep them that way.
Another way you can help is to urge your local newspaper to subscribe to Goodman's weekly column.