Media & Entertainment

Multi-media journalists face jail time after reporting on North Dakota pipeline protest

Comment

Image Credits: Desiree Kane (opens in a new window) / Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 3.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Investigative reporter and co-founder of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman, is now facing riot charges in the state of North Dakota after her report on a Native American-led pipeline protest there went viral on Facebook.

Democracy Now! issued a statement about the new charges against Goodman late Saturday.

The news organization, which spun out of WBAI-FM, creates programming which is syndicated via radio, podcasts, cable television, public access television, live streams and Web downloads.

Goodman’s story, posted to Facebook on September 4th, has been viewed more than 14 million times on the social media platform, Democracy Now! said, and was picked up by mainstream media outlets and networks including CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and The Huffington Post (a site owned by TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon).

Additionally, documentary filmmaker Deia Schlosberg, is facing felony and conspiracy charges that could carry a 45-year sentence for filming at another pipeline protest in the state, IndieWire reports.

Edward Snowden noted Schlosberg’s predicament on Friday with a tweet that said, “This reporter is being prosecuted for covering the North Dakota oil protests. For reference, I face a mere 30 years.”

Authorities released Schlosberg, who also runs a production studio called Pale Blue Dot Media, after originally detaining her but they confiscated her footage and refused to release it according to public tweets from Josh Fox, a fellow filmmaker.

For those unfamiliar with the pipeline protests, the Standing Rock Sioux are seeking to halt the construction of a $3.8 billion pipeline saying its development will encroach on their tribal burial sites and taint their water supply at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

And environmentalists in a group called Climate Direct Action are seeking to stop the movement of tar sands from Canada into the U.S. via a pipeline operated by TransCanada in Wallhalla, North Dakota. Schlosberg was filming the activists as they interfered with normal operations of the pipeline’s valves.

The demonstrations in North Dakota have been ongoing for months. Native American advocates and environmentalists have protested the pipeline’s development in other cities and states, as well.

On October 10th, witnesses at a rally in Reno, Nevada captured footage of a pickup truck plowing into a group of activists protesting the pipeline’s development, and calling for Columbus Day to be changed to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in their state.

Several posted their footage and thoughts about the apparent attack on Facebook as well. The Reno incident injured five and sent one to the hospital. The rally was organized by the American Indian Movement of Northern Nevada (AIMNN).

It remains to be seen whether the charges against Goodman, Schlosberg and other journalists covering the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline will stick.

But these cases highlight the increasing power, and risks, associated with online distribution for news stories covered by independents, and earlier missed by mainstream networks. Virality and independence, it seems, can attract prosecutorial ire.

 

Updates: A paragraph was added to this post to reflect the fact that the two journalists, Amy Goodman and Deia Schlosberg, were reporting on different pipeline protests within the state of North Dakota. 

More TechCrunch

AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have enabled many apps to make transcription an integral part of their feature set for personal note-taking, and the space has quickly flourished as a…

Buymeacoffee’s founder has built an AI-powered voice note app

Airtel, India’s second-largest telco, is partnering with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and GenAI solutions to Indian businesses.

Google partners with Airtel to offer cloud and genAI products to Indian businesses

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focused on remarkable women who’ve contributed to…

Women in AI: Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick wants to pass more AI legislation

We took the pulse of emerging fund managers about what it’s been like for them during these post-ZERP, venture-capital-winter years.

A reckoning is coming for emerging venture funds, and that, VCs say, is a good thing

It’s been a busy weekend for union organizing efforts at U.S. Apple stores, with the union at one store voting to authorize a strike, while workers at another store voted…

Workers at a Maryland Apple store authorize strike

Alora Baby is not just aiming to manufacture baby cribs in an environmentally friendly way but is attempting to overhaul the whole lifecycle of a product

Alora Baby aims to push baby gear away from the ‘landfill economy’

Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience. During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang…

Go on, let bots date other bots

Welcome to Week in Review: TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. This week Apple unveiled new iPad models at its Let Loose event, including a new 13-inch display for…

Why Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is so misguided

The U.K. Safety Institute, the U.K.’s recently established AI safety body, has released a toolset designed to “strengthen AI safety” by making it easier for industry, research organizations and academia…

U.K. agency releases tools to test AI model safety

AI startup Runway’s second annual AI Film Festival showcased movies that incorporated AI tech in some fashion, from backgrounds to animations.

At the AI Film Festival, humanity triumphed over tech

Rachel Coldicutt is the founder of Careful Industries, which researches the social impact technology has on society.

Women in AI: Rachel Coldicutt researches how technology impacts society

SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Sophia Mendelsohn wants to incentivize companies to be green because it’s profitable, not just because it’s right.

SAP’s chief sustainability officer isn’t interested in getting your company to do the right thing

Here’s what one insider said happened in the days leading up to the layoffs.

Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team

StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from the Silicon Valley & Global VC scene while creating meaningful connections over cocktails and canapés with leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. And TechCrunch…

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India, has secured $275 million in a new funding round.

Meesho, an Indian social commerce platform with 150M transacting users, raises $275M

Some Indian government websites have allowed scammers to plant advertisements capable of redirecting visitors to online betting platforms. TechCrunch discovered around four dozen “gov.in” website links associated with Indian states,…

Scammers found planting online betting ads on Indian government websites

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far

The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit.

Anthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look,…

Startups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack…

Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts

AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.  Announced in a post on the company’s official…

Anthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits

Zeekr’s market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers.

The buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker

Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…

VC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

Bluesky now lets you personalize main Discover feed using new controls

Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to…

Microsoft is launching its mobile game store in July

Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular…

Oura launches two new heart health features

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn