Dakota Access Pipeline
protestor being treated after pepper sprayed by private security contractors on
land being graded for the oil pipeline, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. Robyn
Beck/Getty
A little over a month ago,
private security guards working on behalf of the Dakota Access pipeline company
clashed with Native Americans. They were protesting the bulldozing of land on a
Standing Rock Sioux tribal burial site in southern North Dakota.
Guards sprayed protesters with
pepper spray and unleashed attack dogs on the crowd – which
included children – in a reprehensible example of corporate violence.
Filming the protests in North
Dakota that day was a crew from Democracy Now! The show’s award-winning
anchorwoman Amy Goodman conducted interviews during the protests and covered
the dog attacks as they unfolded.
The show’s subsequent
special report about the incident went viral, with more than 14 million
people viewing it on Facebook.
Shortly thereafter, the Obama
administration intervened, stopping pipeline construction on Army Corps land
and asking the company to “voluntarily
pause all construction activity“ in the area.
This victory for the Standing
Rock Sioux would likely not have been possible without the aggressive
independent reporting of Democracy Now!, whose pictures created
significant public pressure.
On September 8th, five days
after the events, local authorities took the incredible step of filing criminal
trespassing charges against Amy.
Prosecutor Ladd Erickson argued
publicly that Amy was not acting as a journalist at the time of the protests.
“She’s a protester, basically.
Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest
actions,” he said.
Erickson
added that he was distressed that Goodman had not mentioned alleged
assaults on guards, or trespassing.
A Hawaii-based attorney named
Teresa Tico wrote Erickson to complain. She first asked if he had been quoted
correctly when he pooh-poohed Goodman’s status as a journalist. She also hailed
Goodman’s career and hastened to reassure Erickson that Amy is, in fact, a
reporter.
This, weirdly enough, is where
my name comes up in this story. Erickson wrote back to Tico and said:
“One of my favorite writers is Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and
I try to track his stuff. Ms. Goodman has interviewed him a couple times that I
have seen and that is my primary source for knowing who she is.”
Democracy Now! passed on this strange note and asked for
comment.
I don’t normally like to disagree with anyone possessing the excellent
judgment to be a regular reader of mine, but Erickson is dead wrong here.
Journalist Amy Goodman poses for a portrait during the 2016 Toronto
International Film Festival screening of film ‘All Governments Lie’. Maarten de
Boer/Getty Images
Amy Goodman was clearly acting
as a reporter at the protest. Moreover, she’s as close to the ideal of what it
means to be a journalist as one can get in this business.
I was actually with Amy in
Toronto when she got news of the arrest. Ironically, she was being recognized
at the premiere of All
Governments Lie, a film about journalists carrying on the independent
muckraking tradition of I.F. Stone.
I first heard of Amy Goodman
almost twenty years ago, when the United States was commencing its war in
Kosovo. Amy and Jeremy Scahill were due
to receive an award from the Overseas Press Club for Drilling and
Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship, ironically a film about
the violent behavior of a rapacious energy firm.
Richard Holbrooke, the American
ambassador to the U.N. and Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Yugoslavia, was
giving the keynote address at the Overseas Press Club event. Amy and Jeremy
tried to take the opportunity to ask him challenging questions about America’s
aggressive behavior in the run up to war.
But when Scahill stood up after
Holbrooke’s speech and tried to ask the question, he was shouted down by all
the “respectable” journalists from the networks and the major news dailies.
Scahill specifically asked Tom Brokaw and Leslie Stahl to support him.
Brokaw instead stood up in
between Holbrooke and Scahill, told Jeremy to sit down, then went on to have
dinner with Holbrooke at his table. The New York Post the next day
wrote: “BROKAW SHUSHES KOSOVO CRANK.”
I tell this story because it’s
a key to understanding the difference between Amy Goodman and someone like Tom
Brokaw, whom I’m sure Mr. Erickson would describe as a journalist no matter
where he chose to take pictures.
The journalism business is
designed to make telling the truth difficult. There are a lot of obstacles.
In return for access to
high-ranking politicians, the government typically charges a little bit of your
honesty.
In return for the large sums of
money advertisers pay to major network news operations, you have to give up a
little bit more.
Then there’s audience. In order
to secure a big one, you sometimes need to give up still a little bit more of
your soul.
The easiest route to a big
audience is a commercial network operation that piggybacks on the popularity of
its other programming, like sports and sitcoms. Go that route and you are
beholden not only to your own advertisers, but those supporting those other
programs.
The other route to a big
audience is designing a program that tells people what they want to hear, which
usually ends in not challenging your viewers/readers at crucial moments.
So if your primary interest is
in doing this job correctly, you usually have to give up the access, the money
and the audience.
You can go without the first
two and still do a good enough job. But to have an impact, you have to reach
people. So you have to find another way.
Amy Goodman found another way.
She insisted on her complete independence throughout her entire career.
Moreover she was never
satisfied with merely doing the job and not having an impact. She essentially
built her own large television news operation, and she did it precisely for
moments like the Standing Rock protest.
The whole point of fighting to
be independent for your whole career, and building your own news network
instead of working at someone else’s existing, corporate-funded one, is so that
you can cover something like the Dakota Pipeline story whenever you feel like
it.
So not only was Amy Goodman
doing journalism when she was at those protests, the only kind of journalist
who would even be there almost by definition would have to be one like Amy
Goodman.
That’s not to say more
commercial-minded outlets can’t or don’t cover pipeline controversies, or the
misdeeds of powerful energy companies. They just tend not to, for some reason.
In post-communist Russia, I
watched as new press freedoms quickly faded due to intimidation by government
officials and mafia figures. A few of my Russian colleagues were beaten and
even killed at the dawn of the Putin era.
We don’t have to deal with
anything like that in America, thankfully, and this is not remotely the same thing.
But a prosecutor who arrests a
reporter because he doesn’t think she’s “balanced” enough is basically telling
future reporters what needs to be in their stories to avoid arrest. This is
totally improper and un-American. We have enough meddling editors in this
country without also recruiting government officials to the job.
Mr. Erickson, thanks sincerely
for reading, but please drop the charges.
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