The so-called “Beijing 6″ were ultimately sentenced, through an extrajudicial proceeding (they did not get to go to court), to 10 days of detainment. As some of us guessed, it turned out to be shorter, with the end of the Olympics.

I received a message via Facebook that one of Brian’s colleagues, Jeffrey Rae, called his father to say he and others were being put aboard an Air China flight to Los Angeles.

I haven’t had the time to summarize and annotate my thoughts on the media coverage of the detainments. I’ve been trying to help make some connections between Brian’s family and the media, and hold down the day job as well.

I suppose the short version of such thoughts would be this:

The articles I’ve seen in the New York Times, Agence France Presse, the Associated Press, and elsewhere have not given much space to the broader context of the Students for a Free Tibet actions, or other protests, and have not bothered to acknowledge the different roles of some of those detained. Not all were participants in the protest. Brian, Jeffrey Rae, and others are asserted to have had a purely documentary role (and my personal knowledge inclines me to believe this). No evidence has been presented to the contrary and yet they’re all implied to be people who knowingly broke the law (however unjust it may be). That may be true for some of them, but some were not even breaking the law as best we can tell.

While what these detainees have suffered is far less than what Chinese dissidents have suffered, the “Beijing 6″ and a couple others have received special treatment with respect to the precedent set in handling previous alleged disruptions during the Olympics.

The former has only been glazed over throughout the Olympic coverage and the latter only mentioned in passing in a couple of reports so far. The facts are lightly reported and the context only exists for those of us who read voraciously and cull as much we can. The papers and the wires have done the public no favors in understanding this situation.

Eowyn, Brian’s wife, shared this thought with many of us overnight:

I’ve spent a lot of today pondering a question that came to me sometime last night — If this is how the Chinese government treats US citizens when the eyes of the world are focused on China, what do they do to Tibetan and Chinese activists, who have no real rights, when no one is watching? I can’t even imagine.

Update: This evening I heard of a report on NPR yesterday, and heard another for myself today that actually distinguished the two different groups of detainees related to the Students for a Free Tibet incident — using the terms “activists” and “citizen journalists.” An improvement in accuracy.

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.”

I think the term was coined with positive intent. It is part of the vernacular of an ebullient forward-looking analysis of new media and the power of the Internet to democratize. I get it, but I do think that general usage has possibly confused things for some, diluting a sense of what journalism is and giving an impression of a sort of false dichotomy within journalism (not that there aren’t any others).

This is a roundabout reaction to the news that my friend, Brian Conley, founder of Alive in Baghdad, and a ‘”citizen journalist”‘ says the press release, is being held in a Chinese jail. I wonder if this citizen journalist component will be played-up somehow (by all sides?), and I fear this could cloud fundamental issues of human rights. Extra labels do not always help. I hope for the best, we were to collaborate soon in another effort.

He appears to have coordinated with some Tibet activists to document some of their protest. Just because NBC news (to pick one) probably wouldn’t do this (they’re busy giving us objective analysis of the Olympics with their China-hired Kissinger associate) and because he chose to show an interest in the Tibet cause does not make this not journalism.

In fact, with the associations being no secret (as opposed to the false projection of untouchable so-called objectivity) and his work as verifiable as anyone else’s, it makes it even more real journalism.

The way Carvin tells it, he was first asked what he was doing and left alone, seemingly with permission, to go about his business. Then security returned giving conflicting messages about what he could and couldn’t do, and why (read his account). He was threatened with arrest multiple times. After pressing for a coherent explanation and to talk to bosses, he still had to pack-up and leave.

Before I express my solidarity, I do want to say Carvin should not have been surprised that he’d get some trouble: The Gigapan requires a tripod and rules against tripods have been common for a while, well before the so-called post-9/11 era.

Aside from security issues, more mundane rules and bureaucratic measures that require special permission for some photography in the name of safety and congestion have been in place for some time in many public and private spaces, particularly in Washington, DC. If one is going to use a tripod and is involved in any sort of media making, they should expect to be challenged by those responsible for the space if nothing is pre-arranged. I do think such policies are sometimes questionable and are often arbitrarily enforced but as an employee of NPR, he might have more easily obtained special permission to use his tripod. That said, the conflicting permission and conflicting reasoning Carvin recounts sort of balances that out.

Fundamentally, I think indignance over this treatment is justified. Often in the name of security, and sometimes in the name of private property, civil liberties are aggressively curtailed by security officials who often seem to know less about the rules they’re apparently enforcing than the bill of rights some of them (at least when they’re police) are sworn to protect. That isn’t saying much.

I have witnessed and experienced similar situations myself.

In Washington, the hostility towards photography in open spaces by tourists and amateurs, even members of the press and others seems particularly intense. On Washington’s metro system I’ve been approached by police and asked to show them the photos I had just taken. Another time, I was told I could not take a photo in the Metro because there was an elevated security level — but the rules publicly available did not back this up.

Often I was subject to scrutiny while others who were taking pictures were not. The only discernible difference I could imagine is that I often carried a Digital SLR camera body — so I either appeared professional (still not a crime) or somehow more competent (not a guarantee by any means) and the nature of my photography was apparently supposed not only to be different (a weak assumption) but extra-legal (false).

This year in Union Station, while I photographed an anti-war flash mob, I saw videographers get repeatedly approached by Amtrak police and suited officials and told they could not film. Enough seemed to challenge, in front of enough witnesses, that the authorities seemed to relent.

In 2002, while covering World Bank and anti-war protests as a then-contributor to an incarnation of DC Indymedia (which had been recognized by DC’s police department — which took our applications and had just begun to issue credentials to many of us) and collaborating with the DC Radio-Coop (a project of organizers with Washington’s Pacifica station WPFW and DC Indymedia), I was swept up in a mass-arrest. Other other press, legal observers, medics, passers-by, and demonstrators — were all illegally arrested. I’ve been shown video of cops pointing to me, and arresting me out of sequence from the crowd they corralled after I had held my camera up above my head in trying to get shots of the arrests at the other end of compressed block of people I was in.

I spent hours in buses and hog-tied on mat, spending time with AP, Newsweek, and Magnum photographers. All but the Magnum photographer and myself got released early, apparently after negotiations between their employers/sponsors and the authorities. When those who could be were contacted, all those who were sprung early with the help of their boss were reluctant to join a free-press oriented lawsuit a credentialed videographer and I tried to organize. Eventually we joined a different suit that included protest participants, which the Magnum photographer also eventually joined coincidentally, and we settled without pressing the issues specific to our journalist status. The Committee to Protect Journalists included mention of the arrests in a press release.

It isn’t just Washington, DC, though: After Boing Boing picked up on Andy Carvin’s story, they shared a couple more similarly themed accounts from the Los Angeles area, one involving the FBI.

Similar instances of arbitrary rules or baseless enforcement of allegedly applicable rules or laws regarding photography have been reported on in the past too. Including twice in the past couple of years where the New York City Metro Transit Authority and the city government was subject to a public backlash after the respective authorities expressed the intent to implement more restrictive rules on the basis of security and public safety.

The example of Union Station raises concerns both about the civil liberties associated with photographing that which is plain view to the public, and the encroachment of civil liberties in general by places that seem public but which are not. This isn’t always a factor of increased privatization of what was public. Sometimes the entities that own or control certain spaces that were always technically private and [mis?-]understood to be public seem to exploit the murkiness of places that are — by most perceptions — seen as public because of their association with public spaces and public or government-subsidized services.

I know there are lawyers will say my qualifiers are going too far, but when we’re talking about subsidies, public-private corporations, and hubs of public services, I think the equivocation on the “privateness” is deserved. In the case of Union Station, I’m talking about Amtrak and the Washington Metro system.

This is likely to get edited for clarity and updated for the addition of sources after I get some sleep and Twitter comes back up.

You may parse the term anti-American differently than I, and if it is truly that subjective, I think that only gives more cause to use the term sparingly. To me the terms signifies a general disdain for all things American: Americans, American culture, the actions and policies of the US government. I’m not convinced that is accurate in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. When you can isolate the sentiment to some subset of those categories a more accurate term can almost always be found, or qualifiers need to be deployed.

One of the additional instances was on May 2. I posted a “tweet” shortly after I heard it. My recollection is that in this case it came from a presenter, not in the voice of a reporter in the field. I visited the NPR site and went through the Morning Edition stories for that day and I cannot find the use in the only story in that day’s archived line-up about Iraq. It was a discussion about an interview with a member of Sadr’s militia.

It seems most likely that I heard the use in the presentation of news headlines by Carl Kasell (the headlines are a part of the broadcast which is not apart of the show per se, and not publicly archived as thoroughly as the show itself). Less likely, but not ruled out (as stories do sometimes seem to get tweaked before they’re rebroadcast for the second time on the East Cast or for the West Coast), perhaps I did hear it in this story and it got edited out.

In fact, the May 2 story was a reasonable piece that judiciously used qualifying terms and appears to be an honest attempt at figuring out what the “Sadrists” are all about. It effectively pokes holes in the idea that Sadr or his followers are truly “anti-American.”

But then, this morning, May 5, I heard the term used again by Tom Bowman in a news piece (again, not archived with Morning Edition and only select audio eventually shows up in the “News” section of the NPR web site).

I’m sure there are more than these three instances in the span of time between Brian’s first notice of the use and today.

This may seem to be nit-picky, but I think this is symptomatic of a broader problem where motivation is ascribed to subjects without due qualification or substantive evidence. Sometimes it comes in the form of accepting stated motivation (say from official spokespersons) other times it comes in the form of the inaccurate use of language. Both phenomenon are, at best, lazy and at other times malicious.

In this case, given the evidence of the nuanced reporting that can sometimes be found in the more in-depth segments of the show, I’m going to go with “lazy.” It seems to be shorthand slang to fit into those seconds-long spots in the brief newscasts. But it is inaccurate. If we return to Brian’s comment, that Sadr is not “anti-American” but “anti-occupation”, we find in his complaint a solution — the equally short but more accurate term “anti-occupation.”

There’s another problem of inequity, which I don’t have time to get into: That of a general trend of accepting the stated motivation of certain actors — say President Bush — and not accepting the stated motivation of others — let’s say, Osama bin Laden, in spite of evidence that both are just as believable, or that the accepted position actually isn’t supported whereas the stated motivation not accepted might be the most supported by evidence. But that’s worthy of an essay of its own and I’m hardly the first one to highlight these issues.