For a dramatic presentation of what’s wrong with the D.C. press corps, watch as In These Times reporter Mike Elk is silenced by Honeywell goons as he tries to ask a question about a poison gas leak—and his colleagues sit quietly by, except for one who encourages the goons because Mike doesn’t have a credential from the Capitol Hill Press Club!
Call it the “Complicity Clique”.
All members in good standing of “Club Cred”, I suppose… ^..^
I prefer the epithet, brainstem mudia, halfascist COLLABORATORS!
Thanks for sharing this clip. Most troubling – and important for us to see.
All this does for me is to create more questions. Is the capitol Hill Press Club the same as the National Press Club? How many clubs do reporters belong to and do they have to belong to one to be a reporter?
“Honeywell goons?” This sounds like an interesting job description, and do all corporations have them? What skills does this require besides being a large man with a suit?
Does the snotty sounding lady that ask about credentials actually a real reporter, or are there female goons in suits too?
An aside to George Will…apparently “goon” is an up and coming job growth area, as robots have not yet been developed to grab mics out of reporters’ hands. However, WATSON of IBM could probably add some exciting fact checking items.
The Fourth Estate is being reduced to less than 40 acres and with no plow animal. It is getting very difficult to believe anything any more.
They partied through J school and got ahead through family connections and could not care less about the American people and their responsibility to us as journalists.
Wow. Unbelievably blatant. Goons is right. And the other reporters just sit there? This makes me sick.
America’s Fawning Corporate Media, as Ray McGovern calls them, is God—- worthless.
One advantage of living in a dictatorship is that you know the news is mostly government propaganda. In theis country we think we have a free and independent press and therefore we can trust what we hear.
Interesting that these self-credentialed members of the Capital Hill Press Club, especially the woman with the enormous red hair, look just like Rupert Murdoch’s trained puppet “journalists”. What kind of Club is this? And, if you belong to an elite little cocktail sipping club, preselected and blessed by the titans of industry, shouldn’t that actually invalidate your cred as an objective reporter? Today’s MSM produces spin and pulp for public consumption, but as the poet e.e. cummings once wrote, in another era of peak corruption, “There is some shit I will not eat.”
wow. been there been done that
Here it is again though, ugly and undeniable, right in our faces, all of us. We better pay attention while we still can.
These corpseorate criminals have their pox/tox ‘slow bullets’ in all of us. Their acts against us are not the outcomes of momentary humanly uncontrollable passions, these are those of a manaical beast, calculated murders for their personal gain. The murder of you. Our nation.
That is what Mike Elk was rightfully after, the slow murders of all of us.. the who, what, when, where, how, why.
Once we begin to see again, what is truth, what is not, and why it is that we are deceptively confronted, clandestinely assaulted by such criminalities.. which know nor care any boundaries.. we can begin saving ourselves. We must.
What I see that is important here is that all the players in this confederation must be identified and known to all. Those goons should be on a ‘security’ list somewhere, and certainly many in the vaunted but deeply fouled ‘Capitol Hill Press Club’ know exactly who that nasty wench was there cheerleading her cohort of goons onward. We should all know this. They need to be added to ‘the list’. Those goons need to be doing life in their own u$aInc POW/MIA Corpseorate Prison Industrial BioHorror Complex, and the bitch needs to spend the rest of her miserable life digging ditches. She can then console herself in her continuing criminal delusions that she is digging our graves, every shovel full until hell freezes over with her in it.
The CEO and his full corpseorate cohort are guilty of High Crimes, it goes without saying that they are all on ‘the list’. They have their own.. and you are on it.. our justice system destroyed by them for now, fight fire with fire. Get their names, hold the line.
The fact is, they are digging our graves, those ‘slow bullets’ I led with. We must stop them. We have to identify them to do that, with all associated evidences, the fuller body of all that showing us vastly more. The Legions of The Enemy Within.
The time is coming, we are waking and bringing it. Put em’ in the dock and prosecute them to the fullest extent of our correctly righted Laws.. every one of them.. every one of them.. sorry about your brother or your aunt.. you didn’t do it.. they did. You are just as guilty though if you do not. No Exceptions. It is the exception that will come back and kill you or a fellow, reinfect the body of our lives with deception and death again.
tongue in toxed cheek..
Ye shall know the Great Satan by it’s Minions poisoning your minds, your hearts, your bodily temples, your lands…
get their names
BobbyBaxter HCVeteran&MarihuanaFelon
Why doesn’t FAIR answer pertinent questions like those posed by Gloriana? Of course, there’s no reason to answer the majority of posts because, like most media commentary, its wildly partisan and divisive rather than illuminating. But FAIR does, I think, have a responsibility, as do all journalists, to “seek the truth and report it fully” as I teach my students. And a key issue these multiple media days is “who is a journalist?”
Adventuring a little farther, FAIR might also pose the question of a balance of rights.
I do applaud Mr. Elk’s exercise of his 1st Amendment rights and responsibilities to ask pertinent, and possibly important, questions … just as I would respect Honeywell’s right to hold a briefing on a specific topic, even with the prospect of somebody – could be a stockholder or a member of the media – “crashing” the event (for which they probably should have planned). As for the pathetic other alleged journalists in attendance, it’s a not-uncommon reflection of the clubby, exclusionary tendencies of many groups of media, from NPR to the national press corps to the white house press corps to the international press corps.
Some journalists are more equal than others!
I think it was petty, unnecessary and foolish for the reporter to encourage security to rough him up. That being said, just because press clubs require credentials doesn’t make it some kind of clique. Did this ITT reporter seek the proper credentials or did he just decide to crash the party? I would’ve done the former myself. If you’re supposed to represent a media outlet, you should represent yourself as such. If you’re going in their as an activist with no professional credentials per se, then he shouldn’t be let in. You have to draw the line somewhere, even if they represent political viewpoints I agree with.
It wasn’t the Poison Gas that got them all worked up, it was the fact that it was Unqualified Person who did it, which put the “Paid” on their lies that you can fire or terminate all unions and their workers, and still have to proper people to do the job for half the price.
But when in room of toothless, worn out, drones whose only job is to peep like The Mono-winged Budgies of Despair when the Corporate masters want, if you go for the red meat the budgies will peep in consternation because they are scared of their jobs.
From Fux Snooze management, “The Revolution will not only be televised, it WILL contain the proper timing in battles so our sponsors can get their advertising in.” Maybe he should have led off with a ‘word from our sponsor” first.
Gloriana, Phelps Hawkins: FAIR, with limited resources and no friends on high, did rather botch this one. Was it a press conference or not? If not, what was going on in there? Mutual admiration? Who were some of those people calmly sitting with their backs to blatant assault and battery on Mr. Elk? What kind of people are they? Who do they work for? Who told them not to look back? Who, in particular, was the fascist lady with the red do?
I’ll say it again (and again and again): We’re not going to get anywhere by simply collecting injustices. The only legal recourse we have , short of demonstrating and getting pepper sprayed for our altruism, is to boycott consumer products. Since the major corporate media refuse to name names, not only of their sources but of the companies supporting and strengthening America’s woeful plutocracy, about all there is left is FAIR (no pun intended).
How many journalist organizations are rallying behind this guy for freedom of speech access and the like? Why aren’t Poynter, Society for Professional Journalists, Project for Excellence in Journalism, and other reputable journalist organizations getting behind Elk? Once they do, then I’ll consider him legit. Just because FAIR does, doesn’t cut it for me. If FAIR really is about Fairness and Accuracy in Media it would highlight instances of journalism suppression on viewpoints they don’t espouse, not just they ones they agree with or promote. This is why I can’t take FAIR seriously.
Journalists are not the men who find the news and bring it to you.That is too easy.They are the men with degrees on their walls, who work for noted publications,and shmooze in the press club.Remember the 3 stooges routine where they hold up press credentials PRESS- PRESS AND PULL(ripped from a candy machine)?I guess this guy was PULL !Yuk yuk yuk