Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much
By Mitch Berg
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this story, about the Minneapolis Police and a bunch of “journalist” from a “new media collective” in New York…:
Three New York media professionals in town to cover the Republican National Convention were detained by Minneapolis police officers in Northeast Minneapolis early Tuesday morning. Police confiscated their equipment, which the trio calls a deliberate attack on their right to free speech.
Vlad Teichberg, Olivia Katz and Anita Braithwaite are from the New York-based Glass Bead Collective, a new media arts group. Among the equipment taken: video cameras, still cameras, laptops, notebooks, money and other personal belongings.
…because while I am a First Amendment absolutist (like any libertarian-conservative), I also notice that whenever the local lefty “alternative” media covers these people, they sow the word “journalist” like mines along the Korean border. Almost to the point of caricature.
They are, of course – like the Minnesoros “Independent” and, for that matter, AM1280 and this very blog, flogging agendas. Which is not the “journalism” I was taught when I did it for a (small, crummy) living.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:56 am
C’mon, Mitch; res ipse loquitur. The pravda from the MPD makes it clear what the MPD was doing, and it isn’t okay.
Yup; these guys are lefties, and they’re here to catch bad behavior — by the cops, not the protestors — on tape. The proper remedy for that is for a: other folks to catch bad behavior by the protestors on tape, and b: the cops to behave themselves.
Hauling the lefty filmmakers away on bogus charges, and grabbing their cameras and notes?
Uh-uh.