Given this era of YouTube, Internet blogs, and citizen journalists, we have to ask why only credentialed members of the media were asked to leave?For example when I stood up in the row behind the VDT reporter and identified myself as taking videos for LAKE for posting on the web? The editorial continues:Some of the people in attendance during Sunday’s meeting have openly identified themselves in the past as active Internet bloggers.
I also said that due to the sensitive nature of the subject, instead of LAKE’s usual policy of videoing and posting everything that seemed interesting at a public meeting, at this meeting I was only videoing people who asked to be videoed. It wasn’t the DoJ’s responses that were sensitive (they said hardly anything after their introduction): it was what the people in the audience had to say.Any one of the people in attendance could have recorded the DOJ’s responses and posted them, but the DOJ didn’t ask to collect people’s cell phones.
I asked “the female DOJ attorney”, as the VDT calls her, if it would interfere with what she was doing in any way if I posted the video of her introduction on the web. She said no, and handed me her card. Here’s the video, with her name, Allison R. Brown, which is not a secret:
The online version of the VDT front page story is considerably shorter than the paper version.
-jsq
Short Link:
Sweet freakin’ Jesus — a DoJ ~attorney~ was present, and permitted (let alone directed) the expulsion of a non-disruptive person (let alone the press) from a ~public~ meeting? Seriously? Seriously?!?
When does the litigation begin?
I think you’re missing the point. Nobody escorted the reporter out. She was asked to leave (after a long time when she sat there and listened and took notes) so that people who didn’t want to speak in front of a reporter would speak.
-jsq