What is a Journalist?

http://noyonews.net/

What is a Journalist?

by David Gurney

Although I've been a trained filmmaker and photgrapher for over 40 years, in the flimsy defense of their highly illegal arrest of this reporter at April 20-21 2010 public meetings of the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) "Initiative," Eric Poncelet's attorneys have repeatedly and disrespectfully attempted challenged my credentials as a photographer, videographer and journalist.

During depositions, like a drowning man clutching at straw, Mr. Eric Poncelet's attorney Chris Tarkington impudently referred to me as a "quasi-journalist."

The fact is, I have made my intentions clear from the outset: to make a historical video record of how the Marine Life Protection Act "Initiative," a privately funded process to create "marine protected areas," took place. I am therefore by definition - a journalist.

But like thieves deciding it's OK for THEM to steal, Eric Poncelet, Ken Wiseman and Eric Bloom chose to break the law, and decided against the U.S. Constitution and California's Bagley-Keene Open Meetings Act. They decided that some public meetings of the MLPA "Initiative" would be off limits to a free press, and the open exchange of ideas guaranteed by our democracy.

Here is an interesting article from Truthout on the new reality of American journalism:

What is a journalist, anyway?

Like many media workers I know, my mind's eye tends to work like a news story. And every time it starts to answer that question, the report it conjures up runs with a black and white photograph: There sits The Journalist at an oak desk in the newsroom of one of the big dailies, hunched over a typewriter, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, fedora centered squarely above suspendered shoulders.

In other words? The definition depends mostly on who's being asked, and the biases that dynamic invites can be much more dangerous than a nostalgic imagination.

If you asked the New York Police Department three years ago, their definition of a journalist would have excluded Truthout's entire staff. In 2008, three online reporters sued the NYPD for denying them press credentials simply because they wrote for a web-based audience. (Three months after the lawsuit was filed, the NYPD gave in.)

But if you sat at my desk, working every day with Truthout's powerhouse team of writers, you'd have a better answer, one that reflects the nuance and diversity of a profession that's being reborn on a daily basis. Our contributors are old-school print reporters and recent J-school grads eager to harness the power of online publishing. They are career academics with a bent for social justice and NGO staffers whose fights for human rights and fairer foreign policy don't end with their job descriptions. They are the family members of people who struggle with poverty, with the reality of being "politically invisible" each and every day. They are, in other words, human beings picking up the slack for a mainstream media machine which no longer represents humanity.

Those three New York bloggers may have their press passes now, but the threats to online and independent media are far from over. The mounting assaults on net neutrality are all the proof we need that powerful interests exist who would love nothing more than to squelch the Internet's capacity for democratizing the spread of information. They're scared, and they should be. It's finally dawned on them that they and their buddies among the media elites don't get to define journalism anymore.

You do.

https://members.truth-out.org/become-member

For more on your rights as photographers, go to: http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/know-your-rights-photographers