Being at the Breonna Taylor protests in 2020, seeing just how different what I saw and experienced was from what got reported in the media, was the primary motivation behind shifting my focus to doing photojournalism. Funny that, who decides to take up a dying profession? In the years since, I've covered many goings-on as I worked on building up my journalism skills, often things the legacy media has declined to cover.
The Saturday before last, local groups put on a series of panel discussions in Smoketown under the title 'Money For People's Needs Not The War Machine.' Was mildly surprised to find one of the local TV stations, WLKY, there covering the event as well. They stuck around for the first of three panel discussions and then left, after sticking around and shooting the other two as well I returned home to discover that WLKY was reporting the event as a protest.
"The group also held a series of panels at the event." WLKY reported. Except the panels were the event, with nothing else going on aside from a few groups tabling in an adjacent room and 90 second breaks between panels for refreshments. Yet that only makes it into the next to last sentence of the article.
While this may seem like primarily an issue of semantics, it has real world consequences. Organizations and locations that are more than happy to let you use their space for education and discussion tend to be about as happy about protests there as your parents were when you threw the kegger while they were away. It also begs the question of how much of their other news coverage is similarly skewed, twisted, misleading?
Thing is, it's not just one news outlet or story. One of the groups organizing the event, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, had recently had to cancel a different educational event due to the local paper, The Courier-Journal, reporting in advance that it was going to be a protest. Is it sloppy journalism? Knock on effects of the Epstein class turning their trophy collecting fetish to news outlets?
Don't have the answers to that myself, but it seems to me a good example of the issue with allowing a tiny handful of people to control our access to information and decide what is or isn't news. Until next time y'all, and please support independent media.
