The local media in most places report on instances where police make dangerous arrests, in turn, growing dependent on law enforcement agencies for their stories, access and sometimes more. Without access, these daily news broadcasts could become a little boring.
Photography Is Not A Crime on the other hand, depends on citizens for its stories. These are factual stories, the great majority supported with video evidence, that are usually vetted by a team of more than sixty members that includes liberals, conservatives, libertarians, senior citizens and college students and many people in between.
PINAC News (as we are listed by Google News) is published by a journalist who’s been beat up by the police, then charged for being beaten up and beat those charges in court, pro se.
In particular, we highlight law enforcement officer breaches of the First Amendment to our Constitution which gives you license to speak every weekday morning. Nobody at PINAC is a “cop hater”, but we’re not afraid to highlight the cops caught on video breaking the law or abusing their power.
That is what journalism is all about.
In finance terms, when a regulator relates too closely to a financial institution that he’s supposed to be overseeing, it’s called “regulatory capture”. “Media Capture” happens frequently in these local news outlets for the aforementioned reasons. Once captured, media outlets lose all taste for pursuing investigative stories to find out what really happened, instead focusing on what police say happened, which many times, is not exactly how it happened.
Sometimes, they even twist the narrative to please police to ensure that daily access to information.
The worst recent example we’ve encountered was this Fox 45 News broadcast from Baltimore. Their deceptive video edit was publicly discredited, but probably pleased a local police contact at the time.
Baltimore’s police behavior problems are ever simmering, like this cop suspended after being caught on tape, the cops who beat the daughter of a Maryland Capital officer, tased her and did it all because she filmed a police beating.
Heck, even the Chief of Baltimore’s PD thinks that the US Department of Justice should investigate his own PD, which has surrendered $5,700,000 in legal settlements in over 102 actions since 2011. (At $55,882 average per incident of LEO abuse case, per the Baltimore Sun).
This isn’t an article picking on Baltimore PD, rather, seeking to highlight the connection between a complacent media and the numerous aggrieved citizens.
It becomes a convenient bargain for the local media when upper management is more interested in pleasing corporate bosses with profits, than providing readers/listeners/viewers/consumers with oversight of their government.
Our goal here at PINAC News is to not only provide readers with oversight of their government, but to provide the training and skills in how to do so themselves as we do not have the manpower to do it all.
An NFL football player recently said: “I don’t understand how a call for justice can be offensive to anyone.”
I say; “I don’t understand how a call for citizen oversight of government can be offensive to anyone.”
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