Minnesota and Citizen Journalists
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Top Story: ICE in the streets
Wednesday’s murder of a Minnesota mother at the hands of an ICE agent is a tragic example of how some news stories really do benefit from the changing face of American journalism.
We can all get frustrated (and concerned) about the plethora of untrained “citizen journalists” out there. But the fact that Renee Good’s murder was recorded by (at least) one person who considered it their job to bear witness is good for both democracy and journalism.
Many of us would like the time to produce more long-form takes on why the current ICE policies are so problematic. But the truth is, showing with vertical video (not telling) may be the better method for drawing the most amount of attention to that story.
Why?
The Minnesota incident resonates on a visceral — not intellectual — level. You can tell people: You should be worried about government overreach here; or you can show them what that looked like for Renee Good.
You can tell people that ICE in the streets has the potential for gross civil liberty violations; or you can show them the video of Good being shot and killed by an ICE agent.
You can indicate how a lot of MAGA policy looks a lot like thug policy, or you can show them the Good video.
This doesn’t mean explanatory journalism isn’t needed here — for the who, what, when, why, and how. But we’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t acknowledge how helpful it is to this story that people with looser ideas about who is (and isn’t) a news disseminator took on the job of recording this horrifying moment in real-time.
ACCOMPANYING STORY IDEAS
Fear and loathing:
With ICE violence in the news, people in your community are likely wondering: are there reported incidents of ICE violence here?
Taking action:
Who’s working to make sure that people in your community are safe from renegade ICE agents? What are they doing, and who is helping (not helping) them.
Do you have to go to school for that?
How exactly are the ICE agents in your community trained, monitored, overseen, evaluated, and compensated?
RESOURCES
How to work with citizen journalists
I’m going to video this: Here’s what to know
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Executive Editor Kyle Spencer
Our Board of Advisors
Alex Aronson, executive director of Court Accountability
David Armiak, research director for the Center for Media and Democracy
Connor Gibson, founder of Grassrootbeer Investigations
Maurice Cunningham, retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Dark Money and The Politics of School Privatization.
Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, founder of Faculty First Responders and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
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