April 27, 2001

11:37 AM

Gag order at Indy Media lifted. Looks like the FBI wanted to get "all user connection logs" from a 48-hour period although the feds were seemingly just concerned with one or two specific postings.
posted by gluechunk (6 comments total)

Can you imagine if the New York times was questioned by the FBI and the Secret service and served with
a gag order?
posted by yertledaturtle at 12:21 PM on April 27, 2001

The FBI is asking for the logs for the two days of the FTAA protests. To continue the NYT analogy, it’d be akin to asking for their entire circulation for two days.

The FBI would have my IP. I didn’t know that reading the news was an act that would make me liable for an FBI investigation.

This is just bad in every way, and I’m not shocked that most corporate journalists are dutifully ignoring this suppression of the press.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 12:50 PM on April 27, 2001

Scary. Great point about the corporate journalists. Where are they?
posted by keithl at 1:33 PM on April 27, 2001

Journalists, hell. Somebody ought to contact Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and get the Senate asking questions. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is also a strong advocate of online privacy rights.
posted by dhartung at 2:42 PM on April 27, 2001

We could come up with plenty of theories, but the one I’m prone to believing that corporate journalists look upon people printing stories by their own volition as anathema to the business of journalism.

Indymedia journalists — which can be anybody — are unannointed in the professional field so corporate journalists don’t see it as real journalism. Looking through that spectrum, then, Indymedia really isn’t press, and “professional” journalists can ignore the gag order and FBI visit. By doing so they are complicit in political repression.

McChesney talks a lot about the rise of the professional journalism and the fetishistic belief in “objectivity”. The downside is that it forces journalists into letting the powerful dictate the news. The gag order is a good example of this, also the fact that Jaggi Singh, the FTAA protest organizer is currently in jail and won’t be released til his trial. Holding him is obviously politically motivated, but it’s an untouchable story in the corporate press. Canada and the US, last time I checked, don’t suffer from widespread government censorship. Professional journalists censor and suppress themselves.

There wouldn’t be a need for Independent journalism if journalists did what they purport to do: serve the public by telling important stories. If they actually showed a diversity of ideas, instead holding to a corporate-government ideology, they’d be doing that. I really think most journalists have totally forgotten that journalism is foremost a public service.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 2:45 PM on April 27, 2001

thanks capt, good points
posted by johnb at 7:53 PM on April 27, 2001