Covering the Rainbow Gathering "Riot"

One of the pleasures of traveling is reading the alternative weekly newspapers that exist in many U.S. cities. While in Buffalo, I got to read two issues of the Art Voice. They both had very high-quality content -- much of it focusing on art and entertainment, but with front sections providing hard-hitting coverage of local news and politics.

One story that caught my attention was a criticism of the local daily, the Buffalo News, for running an Associated Press story on the recent Rainbow Gathering that did not question AP's limited sourcing. I remember reading something about the confrontation myself before leaving home earlier this month, but I have to admit it didn't sink in much.

The story in Art Voice was written by Michael I. Niman, a journalism and media studies professor at Buffalo State. He wrote his dissertation on the Rainbows, and is in the process of making a documentary about the movement, and so was on site at the most recent gathering in Wyoming.

The story I read originally, as I recall it (probably from the Minneapolis Star Tribune), said something about the Rainbows fighting the police. From Niman's critique, it sounds like the Buffalo News ran the same AP story:

The AP/Buffalo News story begins with this sentence: “About 400 members of the Rainbow Family threw rocks and sticks at 10 federal officers as they tried to arrest a member of the group, the U.S. Forest Service said Friday.” [DN3 notes: This story is not on the Buffalo News website any more... which I find interesting.]

Contrast that to the local coverage by the Jackson Hole Star Tribune, the nearest daily newspaper on the ground in Wyoming, who began their story with this lead paragraph:

“U.S. Forest Service officers pointed weapons at children and fired rubber bullets and pepper spray balls at Rainbow Family members while making arrests Thursday evening, according to witnesses.”

How's that for a textbook example of the way the same event can appear completely different, depending on the angle?

To be fair to the Buffalo News, they did run two more stories following up on the situation: ACLU plans to investigate Rainbow Family treatment on July 6, and then Official: Feds should consider Rainbow Family ban on July 7.

The first of those stories was also carried by the Minneapolis Star Tribune (without the earlier, balancing story about the ACLU). So if anything, my hometown paper is doing a worse job than the Buffalo paper. Hmmm.

I have friends who have been present at what they describe as "cop riots," where police attack protesters using overwhelming force despite little or no provocation. It's easy for those of us who haven't felt a need to exercise our right to free association or speech in a public forum to think that those who do so have done something to provoke the police, that they somehow deserve what happens to them. And that we would be immune in the same situation because our behavior would not provoke them.

But I have a nagging sense that our freedoms are more limited than we imagine, that they exist, in some ways, only on paper, and that those who actually put them into practice often find themselves at the wrong end of a nightstick or even pepper bullets, as happened with the Rainbows and their children.

The main point of Niman's article, though, is that AP (and the papers that carried the AP story) failed because they didn't check the police story for corroboration, in effect rubber-stamping the police point of view. There were independent observers there, including other independent journalists, who contradict the police story.

His point is, what's the purpose of a free press, if it's just going to regurgitate the government's news releases?