Police Monitoring Facebook to Silence Potential Protestors

A recent story from Political Blindspot has been haunting me since it was published this October. Its title, “Facebook and Twitter Sync with Police to Squash Protests Before They Start” pretty much sums up the short article. Apparently at an International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Pennsylvania

“a Chicago Police Department official told attendees at this law enforcement conference that his department has been working directly with a ‘security chief at Facebook’ to block certain users from the social networking site if it is determined they have posted what is deemed ‘criminal content.’”

I did some research on the sources, and it seems legitimate. One of the quoted sources shows videos and pictures on their website of the conference, including a picture of the slideshow defining “Social Media Monitoring Tool.”

First of all, since when did it become acceptable for the PD to decide what “criminal content” is? Is that not something that should be determined by the Supreme Court? And what about the First Amendment right to free speech? We’re not talking here about finding evidence for murder cases. We’re talking about people organizing protests. We’re talking about Occupy Wall Street protestors. We’re talking about those following in the footsteps of those who organized and partook in the Arab Spring, which was so successful in overthrowing decades-old dictators and unfair governments in the Middle East thanks to the very social media outlets that the police in the United States are now trying to censor.

They are obviously afraid of something. Could it be the growing discontent of the people in a flawed and disintegrating system? Could it be the dissipating boundaries between billions of people around the globe thanks to social media, which makes it harder for us to be controlled by them?

If so, then good. We are doing something right as a people and using our right to free speech and freedom of the press, since Facebook and Twitter, although they are not media companies, are still ways for people to distribute news.

This censorship is wrong, but I don’t foresee it working. The people of the United States are too free to allow this degree of police state madness to really take ahold.

At least I really hope so.

 

Why You Shouldn't Trust the Media

“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.” – Noam Chomsky

(source)

Before I started to really understand how the system works, meaning the government, the media, corporations, etc., my only sources of news were The New York Times, CNN, and NPR. Not only did I consume their news every single day, but I consumed only their news every day, and I idolized them.

Today, still a news junkie, I continue to read articles at The New York Times website, and I still follow my morning ritual of listening to NPR’s Morning Edition with my morning coffee and cigarette, but the more I realize just how corrupt, selective, and controlled mainstream media is, the more I delve into independent news outlets to find out what’s really going on in the world. I started off slowly, supplementing some headlines from Salon with my daily dose of The Wall Street Journal, but now I find myself making the popular media my daily vitamin rather than my main course meal. Since doing extensive research, I’m simply distrustful of mainstream media. As I should be.

If you know anything about how capitalism works, you know that the following mantra holds true in every field of work in the United States: Money. Is. Everything. Corporations have the money. Corporations own the mainstream media. Therefore, they have the ultimate power in determining what news consumers know.

Concentration of media ownership has been rapidly increasing since the 1980s, as six corporations have taken ownership of an unbelievable majority of what Americans watch, hear, and read every day. Media consolidation has put 90% of our news in the hands of NBC Universal, CBS Corporation, News Corporation, Viacom, Walt Disney, and Time Warner.

Of course, news outlets are not going to publish anything that goes against the ideologies of their corporate owners or advertisers, nor will they publish anything that could potentially harm the image of their owners or advertisers, even if the potential story is harmful to the public and completely verifiable. Why? Because within this system, profit is more important than the public’s well-being. Even for journalists, who in the past have been seen as the watchdogs of just these corporations and the government, and whose goal was originally to protect democracy by helping the people be informed. Today they are failing us.

In the past when reporters have tried to cover important news-worthy stories that are potentially harmful to the people with the money, those reporters have been fired. Look at Emmy award winner Kristina Borjesson, author of the book Into the Buzzsaw, which is about her experience at CBS trying to publish a story about how a US Navy missile had accidentally shot down TWA Flight 800 and how the FBI was trying to hide it from the public. Borjesson was consequently fired from CBS, as was law enforcement consultant Paul Ragonese, who was replaced by James Kallstrom, who also happened to be the FBI’s TWA 800 task force chief.

Another example of mainstream media corruption fueled by profit comes, not surprisingly, from FOX News. Reporter Jane Akre and her husband, investigative reporter Steve Wilson, had been working on a story about hormones in milk, part of which had to do with the infamous corporate giant Monsanto. When Monsanto’s lawyers wrote FOX News saying that the story would be damaging to Monsanto and have “dire consequences for FOX News,” FOX responded by firing the news director and general manager. The rest is summed up in the following paragraph online:

“It was not long after our [unsuccessful] struggle to air an honest report had begun that Fox fired both the news director and the general manager. The new general manager, Dave Boylan, explained that if we didn't agree to changes that Monsanto and Fox lawyers were insisting upon, we'd be fired for insubordination within 48 hours. We pleaded with Dave to look at the facts we'd uncovered, many of which conclusively disproved Monsanto's claims. We reminded him of the importance of the facts about a basic food most of our viewers consume and feed to their children daily. His reply: ‘We paid $3 billion dollars for these TV stations. We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!’”

The reporters were continually threatened with losing their jobs, were told to distort their story to be more favorable to Monsanto, and bribed with money to keep everything they had uncovered a secret, but they refused and were, of course, fired.

 

 Most journalists or aspiring journalists I know would probably confidently say that they would never give in to such bribery and would hold journalistic ethics and standards of democracy above money; however, I would argue that it is also our responsibility as journalists to know where our news is coming from and to understand the context from which it is coming from. As watchdogs, we have to always be skeptical of where information comes from when writing stories, but also when reading or listening to them, keeping in mind that sad-but-true fact that in the current system, money runs everything. Being idealistic about mainstream media is the fastest way to be duped and manipulated by an exploitative capitalist system. The best way to avoid this is to read alternative news.

Some of my favorites are Salon, Political Blind Spot, and Mother Jones, a non-profit news organization. Where do you get news that isn't owned by any of the "big six?"

 

 

Wise Words of Anderson Cooper

“Be honest about what you see, get out of the way, and let the story reveal itself.” – Anderson Cooper

Angling Heartstrings

Most journalists I know personally cite many reasons for why they wanted to go into the field: They want their voices to be heard. They like the excitement. They saw the famous movie “All the President’s Men” and decided right then and there that they wanted to be the ruthless and pensive Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. One idealistic aspiration for entering this career field, however, lies at the foundation of their career path – a desire to transform the world for the better.

Reporting is truly a powerful tool in causing change. As the Tom Stoppard quote at the top of my blog says, 

“…if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

The news is where people find out about conflicts that affect the entire globe, and knowledge is the catalyst for change. Anderson Cooper said,

“A lot of compelling stories in the world aren’t being told, and the fact that people don’t know about them compounds the suffering.”

Through reporting alone we can educate and therefore make a difference. The angles we take in our reporting can have an greater affect on the readers’ urge to incite change, as well.

This piece from The New York Times is a prime example of how a different angle, a humanitarian angle, pulls at the heartstrings of its readers, even though they’ve likely read the same kind of story several other times.

When reading about natural disasters, war, or other horrific phenomenon that happen around the world, it’s difficult for most people to really register all the facts and statistics and number of dead, etc. It’s not until an event hits close to home that people really, truly care. So how do you make a tsunami that killed thousands in East Asia, or a bombing in the heart of Baghdad, affect the thoughts and emotions of people living in the Midwestern United States? You do it by putting a human face on the facts and statistics. 

Everyone knows that there’s perpetual conflict happening all around the Middle East. It seems there’s a new headline every day about a suicide bomber blowing up a building somewhere in Afghanistan, resulting in tens of civilian casualties. It’s been going on for decades now, and as sad as it is, humans become desensitized to this kind of news, glancing over the headline as though it were another annoying denture ad. I wish I could claim freedom from the guilt of this myself, but we’ve all done it. This story from The New York Times, however, caught my eye because it gave the same old story in a whole new way.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times Bibi Hawa with daughters               

Behishta, 5, left, and Mursal, 7, and a son, Faisal, 6, at home in Kabul.

Ms. Hawa lost two daughters, Khorshid, 15, and Parwana, 11, in

a suicide bombing on Sept. 8.

Instead of simply reporting on the fact that a suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of a street resulting in an uncertain number of casualties, the reporter tells the story through the lens of a family who lost two teenage daughters in the blast: how the girls’ other siblings desperately tried searching through the piles of severed and bloody limbs for their older sisters, how the mother found out, the grief of the father, and the nightmares of the shopkeeper who watched it all happen in front of his store.

It’s all fact, but it’s fact through a human lens. This article made me emotional, even though I’ve read so many articles and heard so many times on popular media outlets about suicide bombers blowing up streets.

This article brings close the stories of these beggar children who are literally risking their lives every time they go outside to play. In this way, it might bring people closer to wanting to stop this madness, if they can only see its impact on a human level. It brings people closer to wanting to save the world.