What do President Donald Trump and Mayor Bill de Blasio have in common?
They both like to use the term “fake news” when it suits them, and often call on only the reporters that veiw them favorably at press conferences.
And freedom of the press was under discussion Monday night as City Council Member Brad Lander (D-Park Slope, Kensington, Windsor Terrace) and Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim had the activist group they founded, #GetOrganizedBK, host a panel discussion entitled “Truth or Trump: Democracy and a Free Press.”
BRIC TV Senior Correspondent Brian Vines moderated the discussion among five journalists, academics and flacks including Joaquin Alvarado, Susan McGregor, Ujala Sehgal, Julie Walker, and Michael Winship, who gave their insight into the current political state and its relationship with the media.
Since the recent election, news outlets and journalists have an impending “sense of doom,” said Sehgal, whose Twitter account lists her as the communications director at the ACLU of New York.
Sehgal said that freelancers, ethnic media or small organizations journalists’ careers and reputations are more at stake due to their lack of tools. Larger news organizations are more protected in comparison with attorneys readily available to review statements and obtain information, she said.
While the discussion centered around threats to a free press under the Trump Administration, Walker, who is the president of the New York Association of Black Journalists, shared her own experience of being arrested while reporting on Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
A photo was tweeted of Walker being arrested with her press badge captioned, “We’ve got to get her out of jail,” she said. “While it was uncomfortable, it was nothing compared to what others are going through.”
A PEN America YouTube video, “It Can Happen Here: Free Expression in America” was shown at the event, which shared international examples of journalists’ punishments with 150 writers and journalists in Turkey detained, writer and critic Liu Xiaobo serving 11 years in China’s prison and over 70 journalists – many following the drug war – murdered in Mexico.
“These aren’t just words we’re fighting for. They’re the lifeblood of our freedom,” said the narrator of the video.
