What happens when an activist accuses a reporter of being a police spy?

July 26, 2016 12:19 PM

"Peter Nickeas is a Tribune reporter recently accused of informing on protesters to the police. Monica Trinidad is the activist who publicly accused him. Jerry Boyle is the Chicago attorney who put the idea in her head. And I'm the media writer who wishes he hadn't."
posted by alexoscar (18 comments total)

When the Guardian broke the Homan Square story, the silence from the local media was deafening. The Trib had to have known about it. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they were working with the CPD.
posted by higginba at 12:35 PM on July 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

It is impossible to tell from the facts given in the story whether Nickeas is or is not working with the CPD. He claims he is not, and he comes across as a decent guy. It is entirely possible that someone else at the Tribune saw the photo on twitter and passed it along to the CPD.

The Black Lives Matter protesters are correct not to trust the Tribune as an institution - it has a long history of conservative slant. The Homan Square story is the perfect example of something that any sensible person should be outraged by, yet it got surprisingly little attention.

Whether the left's healthy distrust of mainstream media outlets makes it okay to level accusations against individual reporters is a more subtle question. And Nickeas can't really publicly acknowledge that their distrust of the Tribune is legitimate - but he could use his reporting as a tool to demonstrate that he himself is not just a police sympathizer, if he chose to.
posted by mai at 12:42 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Which is to say that when someone is accusing you of something like racism, the initial knee-jerk response is to be defensive. But I think it is important to bring some humility to those conversations and acknowledge the validity of what the other people are saying, even if you feel that there was a misunderstanding.
posted by mai at 12:44 PM on July 26, 2016

"What is it about journalists activists don't trust?"

A good journalist doesn't tell anyone's story uncritically.

I have no opinion on how good a journalist Nickeas is, or whether he's passing info to the police or not.
posted by bonehead at 12:44 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm sorry - I've literally with my own two eyes seen journalists at demonstrations take untrustworthy photos with which to smear protesters. Whatever their reasoning, many of them seem to take "small, basically peaceful crowd of people milling around in a boring way such that I always kind of want to go home" and turn it into "chaotic and dangerous-feeling swirl of bodies". I very rarely even recognize events I have actually attended, so misleadingly are they usually photographed.

Journalists rely on the fact that most people never go to protests, and they photograph them in such a way that most people will never want to go. Not that "boredom, too much sun and the fact that they have scheduled literally ten speakers before the march and eight are bad" doesn't provide enough reason not to go to protests, but still.

What's more, there used to be a couple of really sketchy photographers around here who were known for pulling that stuff - they may still be for all I know, but at the time one of my friends was a lawyer with the NLG so I heard more of the on-the-ground details.

Can I know what is in this dude's heart? I can't, of course, but frankly, if you're in the habit of taking and distributing misleading photos that lead to people being targeted by the cops and smeared on social media, you need to sit down and think about your life choices.
posted by Frowner at 12:50 PM on July 26, 2016 [23 favorites]

Jerry Boyle is the Chicago attorney who put the idea in her head.

This is so super-patronizing though. Because she has no ability to think for herself and if that nasty "agitator" hadn't told her this she would never have thought it?

I mean, that's probably not what he wants to mean, but it's astonishingly tone-deaf. And does not do nearly enough to address why the idea might be so believable in the first place.

Telling people to shut up and stop discussing things they think are suspicious is a bad position from which to argue.
posted by emjaybee at 12:55 PM on July 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

Here's why the Guardian's Homan Square coverage is a such a quagmire.

Reporters who cover Chicago crime are very familiar with the facility, because they go there all the time. The Chicago PD has regularly held press conferences there for years. Regular people go there, too, though parts of the building are very secure. Everybody knows what units are stationed there.

And here's the crux: What goes on there is no different from what goes in police operations around the city. The reason local media (and a lot of folks who investigate police misconduct in the city) resented the story is because it took a systemic issue and wrapped in sensationalism, as though this one building were the problem.

Here's a pretty good breakdown of the local response. (Yes, it's from the Trib. For whatever it's worth, the article is pretty anti-CPD.)
posted by alexoscar at 12:57 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

What goes on there is no different what goes in police operations around the city.

If I understand you here, you're alleging that CPD routinely holds people without charge or record and uses torture, systemwide, as a matter of policy. Is that your intent?
posted by mwhybark at 1:02 PM on July 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

She should have learned from the media and phrased it "Could Nickeas be a secret police spy?", maybe with an anonymous and tenuously possible source suggesting that he was and noting Nickeas' lack of denial by press time.

Then she could write an editorial about how we all need to do something about police spies whist repeating the claims of biased sources without even a hint of critical examination.

She won't do that, of course. She's not a Tribune hack.
posted by jaduncan at 1:02 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

"I am not a journalist," she asserted in an e-mail. But she saw this as "a great opportunity to have a deeper conversation on how journalists in mainstream/dominant media have historically developed relationships with police officers to get immediate information for their stories, how the police do not protect people, nor the truth, but indeed protect the state, meaning that journalists and reporters need to recognize that cops lie, and that inevitably leads to biased reporting, and like I said in my statement, the hyper-criminalization of Black and brown people in the media.

Sounds like actually the accusation, though an over-reaction, did lead to some good.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:04 PM on July 26, 2016

I think Michael Miner has got this story all wrong. I don't see anything in what Monica Trinidad wrote that says this reporter is a police informant. What it accuses him of is biased reporting, which makes it easier for the police to arrest activists without facing public backlash. The real story here, which Miner only hints at (and almost seems to sort of support) is the attempt to have Trinidad fired from an academic journalism program for expressing her opinions. That story needs some more details.
posted by JohnKarlWilson at 1:27 PM on July 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Given that the Tribune had been completely credulously reporting the Fraternal Order of Police's media guy Pat Camden's lies credulously forever (even well after he has been repeatedly outed as serial media manipulator) there are much much bigger fish to fry with regard to Chicago media and police collusion.

I guess we will see what comes out when the Fed's are done with their probe of the CPD.

[I followed Nickeas on twitter for a few years but burned out on the non-stop murder and shooting. I couldn't follow even just his tweets and stay sane. I have no idea how he could manage.]
posted by srboisvert at 2:09 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

If I understand you here, you're alleging that CPD routinely holds people without charge or record and uses torture, systemwide, as a matter of policy. Is that your intent?

Well, they did and it was policy, even if it was only proven to be policy under Jon Burge in Area 2. The appeals are still working through the courts, and the City is still feeling the fall out, so it's no great leap to believe it's still policy in at least one Area.
posted by crush-onastick at 4:28 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Whatever their reasoning, many of them seem to take "small, basically peaceful crowd of people milling around in a boring way such that I always kind of want to go home" and turn it into "chaotic and dangerous-feeling swirl of bodies".

After attending the Trump protest in Chicago I was frustrated to see this bullshit in the New York Times:

The images broadcast to the world Friday evening from Chicago — of people shouting and swinging at one another, of others lying bloodied in the streets — felt like a nation many of us didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to recognize.

I don't recognize it, either, and I was there, because the fact is, no one was "lying bloodied in the streets." No such images were broadcast, because none exist, because it never happened. I contacted Ashley Parker, the author, to ask if she could direct me at any of those images; I heard nothing back. I believe she made it up out of whole cloth. You'd think this kind of straight-up manufacturing of violent crimes that never took place might get a reporter in trouble, unless you'd ever been to a protest and read about it later. It happens all the time.
posted by enn at 4:32 PM on July 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

She should have learned from the media and phrased it "Could Nickeas be a secret police spy?", maybe with an anonymous and tenuously possible source suggesting that he was and noting Nickeas' lack of denial by press time.

As JohnKarlWilson noted, Trinidad didn't say that Nickeas was a secret police spy. She said he should be treated as if he were one, and explained why: he frames activists and reports propaganda for the police.

She also noted that journalists could cause people harm and land them in jail, reported that a lawyer observed Nikeas operating in a way that advanced the "criminalization of young, Black people," advised people not to trust him and observed that his behavior "one, small example of the ways in which mainstream media, like the Chicago Tribune, can be irresponsible, distort reality, and uphold white supremacy."

The substance of all that, it seems to me, is enough to support the notion that if Nickeas isn't a police spy, he might as well be one. The pushback seems to focus exclusively on whether the journalist is literally a police informant, but it seems to me, that Trinidad's advice, to treat NIckeas as if he were a spy, is something prudent Chicago activists would benefit from considering seriously.
posted by layceepee at 5:33 PM on July 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

Trinidad didn't say that Nickeas was a secret police spy. She said he should be treated as if he were one...

...the notion that if Nickeas isn't a police spy, he might as well be one.

What a bunch of disingenuous horseshit.

She posted the photo of a journalist and accused him of being a tool for the police. With zero evidence and a lot less concern for the truth than Nickeas clearly exhibits in his news stories. Read a few of them before you pull out your overused "mainstream journalism" trope.
posted by sixpack at 10:56 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jerry Boyle may think Nickeas is directly feeding information to the police, but I thought Monica Trinidad's article was very careful about not making that accusation, and instead saying that activists should not trust him because of pro-police bias in his professional activity (in this case his Twitter activity, which is apparently part of his job for the Tribune). That isn't "disingenuous horseshit." She mentions a handful of specific examples of biased tweets, although not all of them have links or screenshots. I'm not in a position to evaluate the claim of bias. But if there was a journalist in my city who did have such a bias, I wouldn't trust them either -- that is, I wouldn't share information with them, act as a contact, or count on them to provide fair coverage, not because they were working for the cops but because their coverage was detrimental to the cause and potentially harmful to individual activists.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 1:24 PM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Just to update, here's Three Years of Three Nights.

I remember taking a photo of the sunrise in my driver’s side mirror before I headed home. I try to look for moments of beauty when I can’t find decency. After covering the fire, all I wanted to do was get home and hug Erin, my wife. I couldn’t conceive of anything else—not breakfast, not the next shift, not anything. I was exhausted, sad, and angry. A week later, a man set himself and his family on fire in Lawndale; he and two others died. It felt unending.
posted by sixpack at 2:10 PM on August 16, 2016