1/9/2024 0 Comments Tim pool time magazineThis might be a good time to mention that Tim Pool is clearly an activist and supporter of Occupy Wall Street as well as a reporter of it. Jay Rosen, of NYU and PressThink, also discussed Pool in a long post that touches these issues: In a long video on its site, TIME profiles one of the most famous live-streamers of the Occupy movement, Tim Pool, who it dubs “an activist/journalist.” Pool doesn’t have a press pass, but he speaks thoughtfully about the values and principles that drive his work – and his actions bear out those ideas. And the protester once again became a maker of history.” However, instead of this history being made by protesters and communicated by professionals, it is being chronicled live across the web by a diverse array of media makers. After many decades when it seemed like protests had little real impact on the world, Anderson argues, “starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. “Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history,” writes Kurt Andersen in TIME. This is a prime example of the blurring boundaries between journalists and activists and a recognition that in a networked news environment we are all getting our information from an array of sources. To that end, I thought it was fascinating that when TIME Magazine announced that its Person of the Year was “protesters,” it included a number of journalists in its pictures and profiles. The point is, this debate should not hinge on what you call yourself, it should focus on what you do. We only need look at the News of the World scandal in the UK to know that a journalist’s notebook is not a get out of jail free card. This also isn’t an argument that journalists are somehow “above the law” or that anyone with a camera should be untouchable. This isn’t an argument that everyone is a journalist or that all reporting is of equal quality or value. I recognize that this is not as simple as it sounds, and that the lines are blurry, but that complexity doesn’t make it wrong. “These are universal principles,” Gillmor writes, “not just for people who call themselves journalists but for anyone who wants to be trusted for what they say or write.” As I have studied the more than 30 cases of journalist arrests at Occupy protests, while the majority of people on my list have had some affiliation with a news organization, I have used these principles as a guide to help identify acts of journalism. In his 2010 book Mediactive Dan Gillmor outlines five key principles of “trustworthy media creation” including: Thoroughness, Accuracy, Fairness, Independence, and Transparency. I think your actions should be your press credentials. The courts have already ruled that, as more people gain access to the tools of reporting, “news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.” If the question is not who is a journalist, but rather, what are the acts of journalism that should be protected, then we need to rethink what a “press credential” actually is. In general, the press credentialing system is broken - a poor fit for the media landscape we find ourselves in. My goal was to account for anyone who was clearly committing acts of journalism when they were arrested.”īut, tangled up in the debates over who is a journalist are very real legal debates about who is given press credentials and what protections those press credentials provide. I’ve already described my views on this in relation to my own work monitoring journalist arrests at Occupy events: “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to quibble about who is a journalist, and who isn’t. See, for example, the debates here, here and here. The question “who is a journalist” has been raised often over the past two months as reports of press suppression and journalist arrests have spread from city to city. In fact, over the course of the Occupy movement, in many cases when police kept other journalists at arm’s length, the only video and reports coming out of Occupy raids were coming from these kinds of citizen journalists. The people arrested were all aligned with the Occupy movement, with some serving on the Occupy Wall Street media team, but based on videos and first-hand accounts they were primarily there to bear witness and cover the events. When the NYPD arrested a group of photographers, live video-streamers and other citizen journalists at an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City earlier this week, it rekindled a long smoldering debate over who is a journalist. Today’s celebration of the 220th birthday of the Bill of Rights comes after three months of journalist arrests and press suppression in cities across America - the most recent of which happened just this week.
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