Riot police confront demonstrators over the Dakota Access Pipeline. (image: The Intercept, 10/25/16)
While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously, independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage.
One place you can go to find reporting is The Intercept (10/25/16), where journalist Jihan Hafiz filed a video report from North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies continue their stand against the sacred site–trampling, water supply–threatening project.
Hafiz reports that after a morning of prayer, Standing Rock activists
were attacked by police forces who used pepper spray and beat protesters with batons…. Dozens of officers, backed by military trucks, police vans, machine guns and nonlethal weapons, violently approached the group without warning.
As the demonstrators attempted to leave, the police began beating and detaining them. Several Native American women leading the march were targeted, dragged out of the crowd and arrested. One man was body-slammed to the ground, while another woman broke her ankle running from the police. The military and police trucks followed the protesters, as nearly a hundred officers corralled them into a circle. Among the arrested were journalists—including Hafiz—a pregnant 17-year-old and a 78-year-old woman.
Once jailed, Hafiz and others were refused phone calls and received no food or water for eight hours. Women were strip-searched, two women fainted from low blood sugar and another had her medication taken away.
On her release, Hafiz was told, “Your camera is being held as evidence in a crime.”
That crime, of course, would be journalism. And it’s hard to believe law enforcement would feel so cavalier about treating it that way if more reporters were actually committing it.
You can find on Twitter what you are unlikely to find on TV–like this photo of water protectors by Rob Wilson.
Since the last time FAIR checked on how much coverage corporate media were giving the Dakota Access struggle (FAIR.org, 9/22/16), ABC and NBC have ended their blackout, airing one story apiece on their national news shows: NBC‘s Today show (10/11/16) had 71 words about the arrest of actor Shailene Woodley at the site, and ABC‘s Good Morning America (10/23/16) ran 70 words on how “a protest over construction of an oil pipeline turned violent.”
For news from Standing Rock, people would do better to follow #NODAPL on Twitter, and check out resources like SacredStoneCamp.org and Indian Country Today.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the producer and host of CounterSpin.
This is the most discusting, disturbing, disgraceful display of what America is all about that I have ever witnessed in my 72 years in this country. I am totally ashamed and discraced that in this day and
Age a group of people can be treated like this. What’s worse than this is that the Bunde group of dissatents (sp) are found not guilty. I hope the pipeline fails to go through and are sued to the fullest.
For a constantly updated aggregation of news sources, I highly recommend:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/new/
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/NativeAmerican/new/
Brenda Norrell has been covering this story since April @ http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/
Well at least Nero’s fiddle tune is catchy, i guess.
This is Fascism.
Now that the entire media is under strict control the American people have no idea this injustice is taking place.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of January, 2010, we are now living in a police state controlled by a few billionaires, and our President has steadfastly avoided facing the issue.
Nothing Obama has done even approaches the significance of his indifference to our sudden proliferation of political action committees making huge, anonymous political donations.
The Obama legacy will be to have presided over the destruction of the American democracy.
There’s also a rapidly-growing subreddit with news, calls to action, background & context, etc. https://reddit.com/r/nodapl
The NYT provided superficial coverage of the story this morning with a brief piece based on two interviews – one with a Native American activist from Oklahoma and the other with a local sheriff. The interviews were only skin deep and left one with the impression that the whole DPL protest is simply about a community divided between “oil and water.” I entreat FAIR to do an investigative piece for EXTRA! that exposes both the corporate media’s pathetic coverage and the depth of the problem itself.
You may want to add Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman as a source for news. She was also arrested but had her case dismissed. democracynow.org