The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
Unrest and protests continued for a seventh straight day in the former British colony of the United States as the government vowed to use its military to end the demonstrations, US media reported on Tuesday.
The protests began in the small province of Minnesota, located in the agrarian ‘Middle West,’ over the killing of an ethnic minority by state security forces.
Protests led by the minority ‘black’ community have erupted throughout the country with the minority group calling for equal rights and better treatment from the government. Protesters have set fire to government installations and looted buildings throughout the country as clashes with security forces continue. The security forces have tried to disperse the protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets and batons but to no avail.
US President Donald Trump, who was ‘elected’ in 2016 despite the majority of votes going to his rival candidate, vowed in a speech to bring in the military to end the protests.
“I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said in a national address.
Trump used the opportunity to walk to a religious temple in the national capital Washington DC to proclaim his religious affiliation. Holding a Christian bible in his hand, Trump declared the US “a great nation.”
Religious Fundamentalism and persecution of minorities
Religious fundamentalism and minority suppression has long been a problem in the former British colony.
The United States has had a long history of suppressing and persecuting its various ethnic minorities since the country gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1776.
The treatment of its indigenous ‘Native Americans,’ its imported Asian and Black communities, and its Hispanic community has long been a source of friction.
American black minority groups were under a program similar to South Africa’s Apartheid policy until as recently as 1964. Today, the ethnic black community is still detained and killed with impunity by the state security forces and black Americans make up the majority of those incarcerated under the country’s archaic judicial system.
Religion also plays a major role in governance with religious beliefs separating key state organs including the country’s highest court where many social laws are passed based on the justices personally held religious convictions.
[Disclaimer: Native Americans is in quotations because it is a blanket term used by the ruling class of the US to call the country’s original inhabitants before the Anglo-European invasion. The ‘Native Americans’ are comprised of thousands of tribes, all with their own culture, language and traditions.]
Writing a letter to the editor is one of the quickest, most effective ways to tell a story of peace and justice. It allows all of us to comment on media narratives and to influence reporting. Policymakers at every level — from the Mayor’s office to the U.S. Congress and the White House — closely track newspapers to see what their constituents are saying. So let’s make sure that they hear our call for support for defunding the police and investing in Black communities across the country when they read the paper this month!
Would I describe myself as hopeful? No. Would I describe the project as hopeful? Yes. Because, again, you don’t do this work if you don’t have hope that this work can have an impact. And you don’t institute a project that says we seek to reframe the way that we see our history, and not hope that that reframing occurs.
some highlights . . .
the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come to fill up more and more time – and, more subtly, to occupy centre stage in our subjective sense of reality, so that the world of national politics and international crises can feel more important, even more truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and workplaces.
It’s easy to assume that the reason you spend so much time thinking about the news is simply that the news is so crazy right now. Yet the news has often been crazy. What it hasn’t been is ubiquitous: from its earliest beginnings, until a few decades ago, almost by definition, the news was a dispatch from elsewhere, a world you visited briefly before returning to your own. For centuries, it was accessible only to a small elite; even in the era of mass media, news rarely occupied more than an hour a day of an educated citizen’s attention.
The profound experiential shift we have recently experienced is not merely down to the fact that the news is now available around the clock; CNN pioneered that, way back in 1980. Instead, it arises from the much newer feeling of actively participating in it, thanks to the interactivity of social media. One crucial difference is that raging on Facebook, or sharing posts or voting in online polls, feels like doing something – an intervention that might, in however minuscule a way, change the outcome of the story. This sense of agency may largely be an illusion – one that serves the interests of the social media platforms to which it helps addict us – but it is undeniably powerful. And it extends even to those who themselves never comment or post. The sheer fact of being able to click, in accordance with your interests, through a bottomless supply of updates, commentary, jokes and analysis, feels like a form of participation in the news, utterly unlike passively consuming the same headlines repeated through the day on CNN or the BBC.
The instinct to look elsewhere is treated as both a sign of privilege and an obliviousness to that luxury. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. It is increasingly taken as a given that in order to help, or even just signal solidarity with, those most directly affected by the events reported in the news – undocumented immigrants facing the Trump administration’s cruelties, say – it is morally obligatory to remain immersed in the news itself.
It’s becoming clear, however, that there is a problem with this attitude, quite apart from the impact on our personal happiness. There are reasons to believe that a society in which so many people are so deeply invested in the emotional dramas of the news is far from the embodiment of an ideal democracy – that, on the contrary, this level of personal engagement with news is a symptom of the damage that has been done to our public life. This raises a possibility alien to news addicts, committed political activists and journalists alike: that we might owe it not only to our sanity, but also to the world at large, to find a way to put the news back in its place.
Today, the news is very bad indeed at ushering in a sense of calm. More and more, it is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention.
One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incident, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
What if participation in politics is a virtue in the same way that, for example, staying fit is a virtue? A person who visits the gym occasionally is doing something good; if she goes regularly, she’s being really good. But if she spends every free moment at the gym, so that her friendships and work are starved of attention, she is doing something pathological. That is because physical fitness is a largely instrumental virtue. It is good because it enables you to do other things, so if you do it to the exclusion of all else, you have missed the point. If you do it so strenuously you injure yourself, you have missed the point in a different way: now you can’t pursue fitness well, either. There is a case to be made that our fixation with the news might work the same way.
the more you engage with politics, the more everything becomes political – and, research suggests, the harder it becomes to understand your political opponents as fully human. This is a situation ripe for exploitation by demagogues, who understand that their power consists in turning the whole of life into a battleground divided along political lines, thereby maximising their domination of public attention.
In an age of attention scarcity, living a meaningful life entails not paying attention to almost every important issue; the greatest saints in history were never asked to care about as many instances of suffering as you’ll see if you scroll through a feed of international news today.
It is also hard to do good journalism about systemic racism: This work requires time, resources, and analysis. After over a year, I was able to get a grant and two publications to give me the time to report on LaGrange in the way I wanted to, spending ample time there and filing records requests. But it’s undeniable that this story is harder to report and harder to generalize than a story about a well-publicized, single, seemingly positive event in LaGrange’s terrifying racial history.
This neglect on the part of newsrooms compounds the violence of the past. During the Jim Crow era, many white people believed lynchings, though bad, were justified, just as many whites today believe policies that disproportionately harm Black and Brown people simply represent fairness and rule of law. As a result, coverage of lynching often advocated a forgive and forget mentality. One article on the lynching of George Taylor near where I live in Durham, in 1918, was headlined “Was to Be Expected,”referring both to the lynching itself and to the refusal of local whites to cooperate with the short investigation that followed.
For white-run media to play a different role today in covering institutional racism than it did 100 years ago, it would need to face its own internalized white supremacy. It would require looking closely at this tendency to fetishize reconciliation and “conversation” while turning our backs on cases of institutional racism, even the most egregious ones (this incredible investigation into civil forfeiture in South Carolinaby the Greenville News is a good example of local media choosing to dig in). And the news media must recognize our agency in deciding which stories to zoom in on, and how these choices can be biased toward a faulty narrative of inevitable racial progress in this country. As Ward said to me, nothing good that’s come to Black people in LaGrange has come because the white community decided it was the right thing to do.
The Internet killed newspapers? uh more like vulture capitalism. The internet sure is a convenient scapegoat for what is destroyed by greed.
“It’s encouraging many Mainers & others have subscribed to help save local book reviews. But, seriously, folks, the chief reason to read your local newspaper is you need local news,” Steve Collins, a reporter for The Sun Journal, a newspaper in Lewiston, Me., tweeted.
“Do we keep these bots because we think they reflect public opinion at large? Or do we think that people are so simpleminded they let obvious bots tell them what to think?”
“Yes.” Maven lifts an eyebrow.
thoughtportal reblogged
Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico, December 27, 1929
me in elementary school
The Chicago Defender, which was founded by Robert S. Abbott on May 5, 1905, once heralded itself as "The World's Greatest Weekly." The newspaper was the nation's most influential black weekly newspaper by the advent of World War I, with more than two thirds of its readership base located outside of Chicago. Abbott began his journalistic enterprise with an initial investment of 25 cents, a press run of 300 copies, and worked out of a small kitchen in his landlord's apartment.