NPR’s new media guru questionably shut-out by Union Station security

NPR’s new media guy, Andy Carvin, was loaned a Gigapan camera rig from Carnegie Mellon recently. I followed his excitement about the chance to take great high-resolution panoramic photographs of Washington on Twitter. Yesterday he broadcast that he was taking it to Washington’s Union Station. Not much later he was sharing in near-real-time a confrontation with security.

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.

Continue reading

Is Muqtada al-Sadr anti-American? NPR thinks so.

A friend, independent journalist Brian Conley, posted to Twitter about a use of the term “anti-American” by JJ Sutherland on NPR that I also questioned. Brian noted his disappointment that the term was used when “anti-occupation” would be more accurate, and obviously true. Since then I have picked-up on more seemingly lax and inaccurate uses of the term. It seems like a trend, maybe even an editorial policy.

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.

Continue reading