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“Why Police Will Continue to Arrest Journalists”

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In Ferguson, Press Corps Has Become Its Own Story

AP Decides Not to Refer to Brown, 18, as “Teenager”

Native American Sees Parallels in Michael Brown Case

Executed Journalist Called “Martyr for Freedom”

Major Media Ignore Book on Slavery’s Link to 1776

Vargas, 10 Others Ask for Deportation Deferrals

5 Children Slain After Deportation to Honduras

BuzzFeed Boasts a Dozen Latino Staff Bylines

Short Takes

Producer Aaron Ernst of Al Jazeera America began his account Tuesday, “It’s not every day that a police officer tells you he’s going to bust your head open.” (video)

In Ferguson, Press Corps Has Become Its Own Story

“At the end of another dangerous night in Ferguson, Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson offered an emotional plea to the media on Monday: Please stop putting officers in danger and glamorizing violent agitators in your quest for Internet virality,” Lindsay Toler wrote Wednesday for St. Louis’ Riverfront Times.

It appeared under the headline, “Why Police Will Continue to Arrest Journalists in Ferguson.”

“Johnson seemed near tears as he illustrated the danger the press face in Ferguson — earlier that night, reporters disobeyed police orders and fled the media corral to take pictures of a car parked across the street before officers could secure two guns. Johnson said police suspect the occupants of the car opened fire at the Canfield Green Apartments that night.

“Journalists defied Johnson’s plea, and it’s easy to understand why they’re even more distrusting than usual. Any journalist covering Ferguson at night has likely been tear gassed, if not hit by debris, rubber bullets, pepper pellets or bean bags. Police have threatened to shoot, mace and arrest reporters, sometimes on live TV or feeds. Officers have detained reporters from the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Getty Images and more, releasing them later without answers.

” ‘Yes, we may take some of you into custody,’ Johnson told press on Monday. ‘But when we do take you into custody and we have found out you’re a journalist, we’ve taken the proper action. But in the midst of it, we cannot…in the midst of it, in the midst of chaos and trying to move people on, we have to be safe. We have to be safe.’

“With the eyes of the world upon them, members [of] the international press corps covering Ferguson have become their own story, sometimes because they’re treated roughly and sometimes because it seems they’re heightening, not just recording, the tension. From a Los Angeles Times reporter quoting an MSNBC reporter:

“@trymainelee says, and I agree, that media has become an accelerant at this point.

“Media voices amplify across Twitter as reporters point to their fear, bulletproof jackets and wounds as proof: If this happens to us, imagine how Ferguson police treat regular ol’ folks.

“Seasoned reporters, bloggers, podcasters, activists with popular Twitter feeds, students, hobbyist photographers — all are converging on this St. Louis suburb, often outnumbering protesters to tell what’s become the most important domestic news story of the year at a time when peace feels impossible for this St. Louis suburb.

“And police can’t keep up, Johnson said. . . .”

Toler’s was but one examination of the role that media are playing in the Ferguson story.

AP Decides Not to Refer to Brown, 18, as “Teenager”

Associated Press writers have been told they are no longer to refer to 18-year-old Michael Brown, the victim of the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., as a teenager.

Lou Ferrara, vice president and managing editor, sent AP staffers this memo on Monday:

“All:

“Moving forward, Michael Brown should be referred to as either

“Brown, 18,

“Or

“the 18-year-old

“Many outlets continue to refer to him as a teen or teenager. Now that we know his age, let’s be specific without using a term that can be left up to interpretation.”

Although the AP move comes amid efforts to tarnish Brown’s reputation, spokesman Paul Colford said the memo was simply a move toward precision. Asked whether AP had been criticized as too favorable to Brown in its coverage, Colford replied by email:

“AP prefers specifics, such as a person’s age. Instead of simply ‘teenager’ or ‘teen,’ both used by many news organizations for a long while (and still used by some) before Michael Brown’s precise age was disclosed by authorities, the editors advised giving his exact age for greater clarity.”

The AP Stylebook defines “adult” as “a person who has reached 18,” although it does not say an 18-year-old cannot also be called a teenager.

Native American Sees Parallels in Michael Brown Case

A year ago, this column reported that the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial — all the buzz in the rest of the nation after his slaying of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin — did not seem to resonate in the same way among Native American journalists attending the National Native Media Conference in Tempe, Ariz.

Asked why, the responses were variations of “Native Americans receive unequal justice all the time.”

The same dynamic seems afoot in the slaying of Michael Brown, at least according to a column by Steve Russell Tuesday for the Indian Country Today Media Network.

Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, wrote, “Indians have experienced this kind of law enforcement in border towns for many years, and know you can get stopped for walking or driving or eating or conversing loudly while Indian, and any objection to being singled out is answered by a use of force without proportion or consequences.”

Russell is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. 

One commenter cited the case of 18-year-old Mah-hi-vist “Red Bird” Goodblanket, shot and killed by two Custer County, Okla., sheriff deputies in December. An autopsy report indicated that Goodblanket was shot seven times with wounds to his head, torso and right upper arm. Goodblanket, Cheyenne-Arapaho, was also shot two times with a Taser.

“Michael Brown gets to be the poster boy this year because there were several witnesses to the shooting in broad daylight, and the Ferguson police have been hiding information that is normally public, starting with the identity of the officer involved in the shooting, now known to be Darren Wilson, 28, a six-year police veteran with no apparent disciplinary history,” Russell wrote.

The judge concluded, “The shooting of Trayvon Martin opened a national conversation on ‘stand your ground’ laws and racial bias. The shooting of Michael Brown seems to have stimulated a conversation about the militarization of police and the wisdom of equipping them with castoff military hardware.

“Reservation Indians have been subjected to militarized law enforcement since the ’70s, when the American Indian Movement took up armed protest. Deployment of armored vehicles and automatic weapons to suppress AIM caused no general public policy debate. If it had, the trend to deploy military weapons might have been curtailed long ago, to everyone’s benefit.

“If the mission of the police is to protect and to serve, and the mission of the military is to kill the enemy and break his stuff, which outfit would you want answering your 911 call?

“Another crucial question: Should the answer differ depending on whether you live in Grosse Pointe or Detroit, St. Louis or Ferguson? Pinehurst or Pine Ridge?”

Executed Journalist Called “Martyr for Freedom”

“The parents of journalist James Foley said Wednesday that they are ‘haunted’ by the cruelty of his death but believe he had accepted his fate before an Islamic militant beheaded him. ‘We believe he was a martyr,’ Foley’s father John said, standing with his wife Diane outside their home in Rochester, N.H. ‘A martyr for freedom,’ ” NBC News reported Wednesday.

“The couple said they learned of Foley’s death ‘like everyone else’ — with news that the group ISIS had killed him and posted a video — but they did not watch the gruesome footage. ‘It’s horrific,’ said John Foley. ‘People can die in lots of different ways but this was the most horrific and it haunts me how much pain he was in and how cruel this method of execution is.’

” ‘It testified to his courage. He was courageous to the end and I think he accepted his situation and I think he accepted God’s faith in him and his faith in God,’ the father said. His wife added, ‘It reminds of us Jesus. Jesus was goodness, love — and Jim was becoming more and more that.’ . . .”

Major Media Ignore Book on Slavery’s Link to 1776

When this column reported in June on Gerald Horne‘s provocative scholarship documenting the central role that slavery played in the decision by American colonists to fight for independence from Britain, few in the media had seen fit to report on his findings.

That is still the case, with Horne’s hometown Houston Chronicle and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times book sections yet to mention Horne’s “The Counter Revolution of 1776,” according to search engines.

But on Wednesday, Horne, who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, appeared on “The Kojo Nnamdi Show” on Washington’s public radio station WAMU-FM.

“As I scan today’s headlines, I see many stories that need deeper interrogation (audio),” Horne said, responding to a question from Nnamdi about why the traditional narrative of the American War for Independence needed to be reexamined. “Stories like, for example, the high and disproportionate incarceration of black Americans, their over-representation on death row, stories like a Department of Education study that suggested that black preschoolers are suspended in a spectacularly higher rate than other preschoolers, academic studies that suggest that black pedestrians are mowed down by drivers more than other pedestrians.

“It seems to me — it seemed to me and seems to me that we need a deeper investigation of these kinds of normalized examples of bigotry. And it seems to me, as well, that we have to go back into history to get a truer picture of what’s going on today.”

Horne went on to discuss the northern states’ stake in slavery as financiers, the participation by blacks in the sacking of Washington by the British in 1812, historians’ downplaying of slave revolts, how slavery figured in Americans’ relationships with Spain, France and Caribbean colonies such as Haiti, and even the role slavery played in extending democratic freedoms to European settlers.

“Given the controversy in Ferguson, Missouri, and given what we know about the United States, I don’t think we should take an easy approach to how simple it has been to apply constitutional protections to people of African descent in the first place,” Horne said. “And indeed, as I argue in my book, part of what drives what is oftentimes referred to [as] bourgeois democracy is the demographic challenge that exists in the mainland of North America, where the settlers had to attract those who were defined as white to a combat zone so they can countervail the indigenous and the Africans.

“And they had to have enticements and emoluments and inducements, part of which were a passel or package of democratic rights that perhaps they did not enjoy — the settlers would not enjoy in the European continent. . . .”

Vargas, 10 Others Ask for Deportation Deferrals

Eleven people living in the United States illegally, including Jose Antonio Vargas, journalist and immigration activist, are applying for deportation deferrals as part of an effort to pressure President Obama to include many millions of immigrants in any executive action to reduce deportations, Vargas and his group, Define American, announced in Washington on Wednesday.

“Mr. Vargas and other advocates want the White House to halt deportations for most of the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally by vastly expanding a 2012 program of deferrals for young people who came when they were children,” Julia Preston reported Tuesday for the New York Times in advance of the group’s news conference.

According to Elise Foley, writing Wednesday in the Huffington Post, “The project started after Vargas, who came to the U.S. from the Philippines when he was 12, traveled to McAllen, Texas, in mid-July to document the humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied children crossing the border.

“After posting on Facebook that he was in McAllen, Vargas received a concerned text from Mony Ruiz-Velasco, a Chicago-based immigration lawyer who previously lived in Texas. She said she was glad he was there, but asked how he would get through a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint on his way out. Vargas said the question hadn’t occurred to him, because he typically flies using his Philippines passport without any problems.

“Concerned, Vargas asked Ruiz-Velasco to be his attorney. He’d soon need one. When Vargas went through airport security to leave Texas, a Border Patrol agent asked whether he had a visa to be in the U.S. Vargas does not, and was detained for several hours. He was released later that day, but received a notice to appear before an immigration judge.

“A few weeks earlier, Obama announced plans to take executive action on immigration. Vargas said that announcement and his arrest made him and other advocates think it was a good time to make the case for why administrative relief should apply to a broad array of undocumented immigrants.  . . .”

BuzzFeed Boasts a Dozen Latino Staff Bylines

“Online news outlets have been gaining on print when it comes to getting minorities in their newsrooms,” Dennis Romero wrote Tuesday for LA Weekly. “There, one in five journalists is a person of color. One publication, BuzzFeed, says it’s showing the way forward when it comes to covering Latinos in the United States:

“The site has gone on a hiring spree this year, adding about a dozen Latino bylines to its staff, although about three of those people are temporary fellows. . . . A majority of those folks are in BuzzFeed’s airy Los Angeles office on Beverly Boulevard.

“The growth represents an explosion, as BuzzFeed employed only a pair of Latino reporters before its hiring spree this summer and spring. Already this month, BuzzFeed received a National Association of Hispanic Journalists Media Award for ‘truly humanizing stories about Latinos fighting, protesting, fasting for immigration reform.’

“The driving force behind the stories, and the man directing BuzzFeed’s Latino coverage, is its new Latino editor, twentysomething Adrian Carrasquillo. Appointed to the position in April, he’s been covering the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, reporting on the child immigration crisis on the border, and sorting BuzzFeed’s Latino content so that it gets to the virtual front-pages of the site.

” ‘I want to respect the audience and I want people to feel we come from an authentic place,’ he says.

“Carrasquillo has corralled a team of young, hungry reporters for BuzzFeed, including Juan Gastelum. Interviewed along with a half-dozen other Latinos at BuzzFeed’s L.A. office, Gastelum says that the site has had to reconcile the fact that the dominant Latino faction in the U.S., Mexican Americans, reside mostly in the Southwest, even as the news industry has a strong northeast bias. . . .”

Short Takes

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