More on this morning's posts, and police actions against reporters

[solarbird]

In addition to this police action breaking up peaceful protest, and this coverage of journalists being forced away from covering an AT&T party for the Democratic Senators most involved in the passage of retractive immunity for clear and direct violations of domestic spying law, we now have ABC reporters being arrested for taking pictures of Senators and their donors, and being threatened with violence by police. The story has a link to video, which features an officer repeatedly shoving the ABC reporter into the street, then accusing him with blocking traffic for being in the street; later, you can see him being throttled by another officer as he's arrested and hauled off to jail. Thanks to cow for the pointer.

Comments

[solarbird]

As I said, "I doubt he will, either."

Obviously I am not making myself adequately clear. My point is that any punishment that would come forth from any variant on embarrassing the wrong people would come from the media ownership and upper management rather than from the government, as that latter has been too heavy-handed and too obvious even for the last decade.

The incidents to which I referred obliquely were documented by Glenn Greenwald sometime within the last year, but I don't have the links and don't remember exactly when, so am not going to go digging through the archives. However, it was part of his reporting on the function of the political media in the current political system. I think ABC was one of the culprits, but I'm not at all sure. I also think I recall that CNN was involved.

Regardless, an assortment of reporters and news editors have had their careers truncated (or at least severely redirected) after writing and producing stories reporting on certain foibles of the Bush administration or which were too critical of the Iraq War and related adventurism. They had stepped outside of the bounds of what I refer to as the New Court at Versailles, and were accordingly removed, on orders from the corporate level. This is how this sort of punishment works, and how further such news-coverage adventurism is prevented.