Response to "Fundraiser to Aid Heroic Journalists in Police Brutality Investigations"
- Tara Stacy
- Feb 1, 2016
- 2 min read
I recently read an article in The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald about Brandon Smith's investigative efforts into the Laquan McDonald case. The article highlighted Smith's work in getting the Chicago Police Department to release a video of the police shooting of McDonald, a black teen. The video shows him being shot 16 times by an officer.
The video was thought to have not been released because it was an election year for the mayor, and they wanted his re-election to go smoothly. Mainstream outlets filed FOIA requests for the video, and when those requests were denied, the outlets simply accepted the fact and moved on. But Brandon Smith sued the city in order to get the rights to the video, and when he won the suit it was released to the public and the media.
It is because of historic journalism efforts like Smith's that our profession is the only one that is accounted for in the first amendment of the Constitution. Muckrakers and other investigative journalists used to work hard for the sole purpose of finding a "voice for the voiceless".
I honestly feel that the journalists of today have gotten lazy in the age of the Internet. They too easily trust sources because they don't want to lose a source for a future story. Before my Independent Media class, I didn't realize how little investigative journalism pieces are in the news today. Reporters in the mainstream media simply report on what has already happened, they hardly ever expose corporations themselves or provide new content that hasn't already been uncovered by an indpendent outlet.
Watching the movie Goodnight and Good Luck in my Issues in the News class also enlightened me to how little journalists produce hard hitting news anymore. We watched Edward R. Murrow fight to expose Joe McCarthy and that really saddened me because it just shows how much TV stations rely on pleasing their advertisers.
I hope that the coming generation focuses more on doing the type of journalism that Brandon Smith and Glenn Greenwald are passionate about, and I think it is important to fund that type of journalism, so that those journalists don't have to rely on funding from the corporations they might be trying to expose.
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