Tag Archives: free speech

An ugly morning in DC

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Click through to view the set at Flickr, with captions. Also see these photos by Jake Cunningham, some of which more closely show demonstrators being pushed into the police car by police.

The sun is hitting DC hard this morning. It’s going to be another hot one.

Another day of protests against the World Bank and IMF is planned. I hear that last night some activists took to the streets of Georgetown in the wee hours of the morning.

I’ve got a lot of questions about the choices made by some to use certain tactics and the posturing of some of these activists — but analysis and judgement of that seems irrelevant to what I witnessed Saturday morning. I went out as an independent photographer, a role I have played for years here in DC.

I saw it get ugly in Foggy Bottom.

Whatever relevance you thought the demonstrations had to the issues they were ostensibly protesting, I don’t think it was their fault that it got ugly.

Captain Herold, of the DC MPD, who appeared to be the officer in command, and who is known to activists as being in charge of the political unit — police intelligence on activists — is attributed in the Washington Post for most of their description of what took place. Herold says “the police were put in danger when they were surrounded as the crowd turned” — this is not true. If the police were put in danger or were surrounded, it is only after they surged into the crowd after an awkward and sudden attempt to stop a crowd that was, in fact, mostly surrounded by police.

If it wasn’t for a key moment where one officer came to the fore, the morning easily could have been forgettable.

I know a PNC bank branch had its windows smashed-out earlier — but that was a different time, a different neighborhood, possibly by entirely different people. I saw no behavior of that sort down around the bank.

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Citizen Journalism / Brian Conley held by Chinese Authorities

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What is a non-citizen journalist? A correspondent from abroad?

I think “citizen journalism” has become a bogus term. (The synonyms that Wikipedia currently suggests are mostly better.)

To me, one can reduce it to either you’re doing journalism or you are not. Journalism does not have to mean professionalized, dispassionate, (allegedly) neutral stuff that one hears about from the lofty offices of the broadcast networks (paid for with what, anything less than socially acceptable hush money from sponsors?). It does have to mean getting your facts straight, it does mean independent thinking, and challenging unsupported assertions before you endorse them as fact. Some of the most revered journalists in American history were often also called activists. They had credibility because they were still independent, and the facts they reported held-up.

Before the term citizen journalist was born, members of the DC Indymedia center (such as it was at the time), were accredited by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department with press credentials. I point this out only as a way to say that I think since then, “citizen journalist” has only served to make it easier for people actively trying to contribute to community media to be marginalized further than they already naturally were (by way of not having thousands or millions of dollars to back them). There is now what is seen as lesser category to cage people in, regardless of their work product, before getting to “real journalist.”

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Of course it’s political

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A declaration that something is not political in itself will highlight the politics of the thing.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.