 Library and I want to especially thank my colleagues, Carla Greeley and Clarence White for their work on this program today. I also want to thank Women Against Military Madness for their help and indeed their invitation that we host this event. For those of you who don't know about the East Side Freedom Library, we are in the midst of our seventh year of being in operation. Our mission is to inspire solidarity, work for justice, and advocate for equity for all. We are in the midst of a predominantly immigrant working class neighborhood on the East Side of St. Paul, Minnesota, and our primary goal is to work with our neighbors to create bridges for them to share their stories with each other, learn about each other's experiences and ideas, and as we say, hopefully, inspire solidarity. When we were offered the opportunity to host our special guests today, John and Gabriel Shipton, excuse me, who have traveled a great distance to be in the United States and to be with us, we thought it would be productive to have a conversation that included people who are working in independent media here in the Twin Cities, and so we have assembled Petros Halle, and let me read a brief bio of Petros's. He is an Eritrean born and raised in Ethiopia. He's been a community organizer and activist here in Minnesota since 1986, and he's the founder and publisher of African Global Roots, the Pan-African Networking and Entertainment Group. Here is their journal, and we also have, with us, Sareen Sadeh. Dr. Sadeh is an Arab-American journalist and educator who works at the intersections of journalism, social movements, education, and sustainability. She currently serves as executive director for the Uptake, a community news organization based here, and she's an associate faculty member at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona, where she teaches in their social justice and community organizing program. Sareen also produces and hosts a local radio podcast, the Radical News Hour, currently airing on WFNU in Frogtown, and we have my good friend, Sheila Regan. Sheila is a freelance journalist based here in the Twin Cities. She's covered a wide variety of topics for local publications, including some great writing about theater and the arts, and she's recently been publishing in the Washington Post and The Guardian, and she had a piece in The Guardian yesterday. So our plan for the day is we will hear from John and Gabriel about their tour and Julian Assange's case and where the case is at at the moment and what we all have at stake in this case, and then we will turn to our local independent journalists who will speak about how issues of free press, free speech, interference with media are impacting the work that they're doing here in the Twin Cities, and then we will invite you to type in questions into the chat function on Zoom, or if you're watching on Facebook, type into the comment function on Facebook, and we will try to give your questions an airing and a response. So let me turn things over to John and Gabriel. They get to go first because they've come the greatest distance. Good. Thank you very much, Peter. It's a pleasure to be here today. Normally Gabriel goes first, but I guess I can go and see today. So always in these talks it's what to do and what to say learns a lot, and particularly as what you say relates to what can be done, what has evolved, the results. So to bring us into the continuing present results of what has been said in the past and what has been done in the past to say something fresh and new. In particular, the revelations of WikiLeaks, they're all held in a library. They're all allegedly provided by Chelsea Manning and covering five great important areas. One is the Afghan war type. The other is the Iraq war locks. Then there's the diplomatic cables. Then is the Guantanamo bay files. And finally, bought seven, which revealed to us the techniques or the engineering that allows CIA and other alphabet agencies, we call them, to confuse, deceive, and overlook all that we do from the internet. The purpose of which, of course, is to model the society, allowing the CIA and the State Department of Washington to cause us to think one way when we would be a greater benefit thinking another way. In other words, they divert our energies, the care for our community, the love for our families, and the becoming of ourselves to their own ends, and not as cynicism involved this bottom. Often you will think that a revelation, if you want to use the term, a whistleblower or a leak, often you may say to yourself, oh my God, here we go again. My government has done another heinous crime or war crime or committed this or committed that. It's just that these constant revelations of governmental misbehavior are onerous and oppressive. And because they're global in their effect, they don't allow me to think clearly about what to do and what can be done and how to discuss it with my neighbors. It's like saying, for example, climate change. It's such a universal concern and anxiety making statement, anthropometric climate change, that it causes us to reduce our power of action and turn over to government or authority the power to act on our behalf, because we feel uncertain, socially uncertain in ourselves. That can be the result. Take a different approach. For example, the Iraq war fires. They revealed to us that 15,000 civilians had been killed. Now, this is burdensome and horrifying. The information allows us to go about repairing those circumstances. Another leak in the diplomatic capers. In 2006, some soldiers now make this point very clearly. When you send soldiers over to another country, which is defending itself through IEDs and separative attacks and snipers, the soldiers become ceaselessly anxious. And the consequence of that, they become unruly and don't follow the rules of engagement. All the rules of engagement are changed to suit the anxiety of the soldiers. That's one. The other point is that to pacify, and that's what the soldiers are there for, to pacify a community, they do the rules of engagement are encouraged to be utterly ruthless. Now, that's not the soldiers' fault. That's the responsibility of the general staff. So it's not the soldiers' fault. However, the soldiers become unruly. In 2006, they went into a family home just outside Baghdad and murdered all the occupants. The mum and dad, the extended family, the children, the grandfather, grandfather, uncles and aunts. Contemplating this crime, they called it an airstrike and obliterated from the earth all traces of those human beings. When this was revealed in the capers, in the diplomatic capers, the cable went from the ambassador in Baghdad to the state department. The Iraqi government was able to read it. Having read it, the Iraqi government was able to gather up its courage and refused to sign and agree to the status of forces agreement, which means a status of force of agreement allows for the occupying soldiers not to be charged under the ordinary laws that govern all other Iraqis. They refused to sign. As a consequence, the war stopped troops for withdrawal. So leaks and whistleblowers can stop wars. Not only that, they can prevent wars, for if we know and knew a little more if David Kelly, who was one of the weapons inspectors specializing in chemical weapons, revealed to the public on the BBC at the beginning of the March to War organized by Tony Blair. He was later found dead under a tree and considered to be murdered. If that revelation had been published, it would have the fruit that to prevent a war. These people, the Tony Blair government and the Bush government wanted a war in order to destroy Iraq. People like Rumsfeld saying that, you know, if you've got to make an act on it, you'd break eggs. Talking about the slaughter of a million human beings, 600,000 human beings, if you take the Iraq War body count number, 750,000 if you take the Lancet, 6 million excess deaths in the Middle East in the last 20 years if you take the research of Gideon Pollard, an expert on excess deaths. Mr. Rumsfeld saying, if you make an act on it, you've got to break eggs. Can you imagine anything so more obscene and grotesque, speaking that way about the destruction of the country and the murder between 600,000 and a million people. So the diplomatic cables allow us to get insight into the daily events that govern diplomatic arrangements throughout the world. And we can now, this minute you can go to your computer, look on your computer, go to WikiLeaks D plus and all of the diplomatic cables will be there plus in a searchable form plus all of the diplomatic cables from the 30 year release of the Kissinger cables. You can go and search and have an understanding equal to those people in the State Department and in ambassadors posts around the world. You can have an understanding equal to theirs. So this pretentiousness that the government goes on, this is a national security matter and we think better about that than you, it's just a falsity. It's just so that you surrender your sovereignty, your personal sovereignty, your community's sovereignty, the sovereignty of your family, the sovereignty of your friends to them so that they can do whatever they like, whatever they come into them. Whatever ridiculous, overweening ambition bites them on the bum that day. Next, we also can bring about justice. So the Guantanamo Bay files allowed the great American lawyer, Clyde Stafford Smith, he established an NGO titled Reprieve and he went with his crew to Guantanamo Bay. There were 22 children in Guantanamo. And he managed to bring about the freedom of many of those so accused. Taken as a whole, the five revelations that I mentioned, the Arab War files, the Afghan War files, taken as a whole in the fullness of time, it's 10 years. A nation's state is rich and gigantic as the United States empire takes a bit of a while to turn around. So taken as a whole, all of those grasps in a single moment, those revelations. 10 years later, we see that they've left Afghanistan, they've left, they're closing, they're leaving Syria. So you see grasps as a whole and in the fullness of time and 10 years is not much in the history of a state, especially when it's rich and powerful. 10 years is not much. Those revelations seeping into the culture of the people of the United States have brought about a fundamental change. Of course the United States, I'll say Washington, because the people of the United States treat me really well. Washington, so that seeping into the culture of the people of the United States, realizing, percolating up into Washington, it percolates up, they're not rain makers these people. History exists in us. Percolating up to them, they remove the troops from Iraq, from Afghanistan, discontinued the destruction of those societies. Clothes go on tonight, okay. So that is the result. That is the wonder of the internet, housing all of those files, indeed, plus WikiLeaks, for us to see at any time and educate ourselves to the level of the State Department diplomats, all of them having PhD. Why? I mean, a PhD. These people have been done two things, finish on this. There's a really question. One is they take to themselves and hold themselves above us and say that we are the holders, we know where the elephants lie down, we know where the source is. We have access to the source. You people, we will guide through the desert across the Red Sea, whatever metaphor that they want to use to separate themselves from us. This is a profound stupidity, moronic beyond belief, for they are part of us. And the education level and the level of culture that we hold within ourselves creates them. And this distinction that they put upon themselves brings them to ruin and us to ruin. It's very clear in the circumstances that the United States finds itself now and its empire, as it struggles against what I don't imagine enemies like China and Russia. And the worldwide distaste and distrust that it's emerged, that's the result of these falsified distinctions between them and us. For they are, they are essentially fundamentally created by the level of culture and education within us. There's no distinction. And having made these distinctions for 20 years, they've done well. Let's say I'll take all of the stones figures. Having made these distinctions for 30 years, they've destroyed 14 countries, squandered 12 trillion dollars. The treasures, the great treasures of the United States, squandered on wars to advance a hegemony which failed and knowingly, knowing predictably was going to fail. So lastly, I give thanks to the people of the United States who made us welcome and also to the end-culturation that has happened with the revelations from allegedly from Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, the end-culturation which is brought about the end of those wars, occupation, and Guantanamo Bay. I thank you very much. Thank you, John. Thank you. Thank you. Kevin. I'm Gabriel Shipton. I just, maybe I can give you an update of what we're doing here in the USA. My brother Julian is in prison in Belmarsh. I'm just outside of London. It's a maximum security prison. And he's been there coming up. This is his third year in prison in Belmarsh, maximum security prison. He's charged basically with publishing. He published what John was talking about, the Iraq war logs, Afghan war logs, the diplomatic cables set, and the Guantanamo Bay detainees files. And under the Espionage Act, he's charged with publishing those and also engaging in what journalists do all the time and dealing with their sources and publishing information. On January 2nd, on January 4th, sorry, Julian 1, his extradition case, the charge rejected the extradition request of the US government and the US government is to be appealed. A few days after that, Julian's bail was rejected. So we're in a situation now where Julian won his extradition case six months ago and he is still in a maximum security prison awaiting an appeal. There's no indication of when or if an appeal will happen. So it's this you know, just basically extended limbo that Julian has been in for the last, going on three years. So John and I here in the US now campaigning for Julian, the charges against Julian to be discontinued or dropped. We started off with a 17 city tour across the US. We started off in Miami and then we moved our way around the East Coast. We had, you know, a huge New York event where we had to, you know, expand the tickets three times over as the event in Washington, D.C., Boston, where we won, where we picked up an award for Julian, the Sacklevin City Award. You know, we had actions in Philadelphia and then we've been in Columbus, in Ohio, Chicago and now we've made our way here to many others and support. What we've seen across the US as we've traveled have done these events. It's just an outpouring of support which Julian from just ordinary people who have come out to, you know, to lend their support and let them know that they care about their rights, about not just Julian's commitment, but about their democratic rights, their First Amendment rights and their freedom of speech rights. We've seen the media just, which there was basically a media, you know, the media wasn't talking about this case at all and over the past month we've seen over 20 articles now, you know, in New York Times is talking about Julian's case, USA Today, Newsweek, all these big publications as well as a lot of independent and small publications, local radio stations who've probably done 10 interviews on local radio stations. We've been on two national news programs all talking about Julian's case and how it is an affront to the First Amendment and the United States Constitution. So as we've been traveling across, we've been talking to people and asking them to stand up for their First Amendment rights to talk to their Congress people, let them know that they care about their rights and that this case, you know, is, I'm not saying this, but this case has been said to be the biggest press freedom case since the Pentagon papers. So it's the first time the SBNR, the 1917 SBNR Act has been used in this way against the publisher to stop them, you know, to make an example of them to show everybody that if you publish this sort of information, this is what's going to to you. Great, thank you very much. Serene would you like to start? Yeah, so I want to be really clear that I can speak from the perspective of being a community journalist here in the Twin Cities as the executive director of a very small nonprofit and as somebody who thinks a lot about what it, what does it mean to do this work for the historically underserved and historically marginalized communities that I represent and that I seek to build power in and with. I cannot speak to the sort of international and national ramifications of this. But what I can talk about in my own perspective is that we see attacks on freedom of the press at all levels and we see it in a lot of ways that maybe we might not expect. I know as somebody who runs a nonprofit and has been fiercely critical of the so-called nonprofit industrial complex that while we might not see that as a sort of traditional attack on freedom of the press, in many ways it does. It controls so much of our capacity to operate. I think a lot about the ways in which there is deep tension between the legacy media and independent media and really not a sense of solidarity between those two groups. I think a lot about the ways in which we are under resources organizations and unable to take those big steps and unable to step into these conversations. And so I just want to recognize that I can speak from a very limited perspective and I also want to honor what John said about PhDs as a PhD holder. By and large as a system, excuse my language, we kind of stink. It is very much a group of people that create separation that talks about them over others and I want to be really clear in saying that journalists do the same thing. Journalists absolutely do the same thing where they talk about themselves having special knowledge or special access and that creates a deep chasm of distrust which makes it really easy for people to not want to stand up for local media or any media because we're not doing our jobs as system actors to build that trust and to build those relationships and to show the purposes of our work. Yeah so I'm pleased to hear what you were saying that there's more of the media coverage of this issue and I wonder just as you were saying that if there's a correlation between oh maybe we should cover the Julian Assange case and the fact that these revelations have come out about the New York Times and the Washington Post being basically under attack by the federal governments and then being given being told they can't talk about the fact that they've been spied on and now we just in this last week uh the ProPublica did the sort of bombshell reporting about the amount of taxes that rich people are having to pay and we've got the Attorney General saying well we're gonna go after whoever leaks that information. I think that there is perhaps and also we have like a huge lawsuit here in Minneapolis with journalists saying we were you know attacked when we were trying to cover the protests that happened here after the after the death of George Floyd a year ago and then subsequently so I think that there perhaps is an awareness that's happening that there's been a disparagement of news and media and they've been kind of put as the enemy in so many ways and meanwhile we have all these newspapers closing right and left and maybe that's not such a good thing so I'm a freelance journalist I don't belong to any particular publication not on staff anywhere but something I think about a lot I am on the board of public record media and we do a lot of FOIA requests and government records requests in Minnesota and it is it's an ongoing battle and one that feels like it's it's it gets more difficult as time goes on so that's us mine could be a bit different in some sense but I like what you say next and which most can prevent more recently as recent as three months ago there was a war between Ethiopia within their ethnic category and one of the things is that it got involved without declaring to the international community so it was exposed because of the social media and many organizations reported that it turns important in the war so I finally and they said that this is there you know to the conflict so my organization we have a keeping station here under Tim Paltrick to be called it an affair we do all parts one thing that I wanted to mention is some of the things that we're talking about within an authority and regime in our country it's put in into Ontario so the only thing is outside of territory anything we do is outside of territory so this is your 40 or 50 media outlets thanks for the social media and we do not part looking here in Minnesota program that we expose as the activity one of the earliest parts that the government did is on September 11th that week he imprisoned 15 journalists in Ontario and they're still in jail for the last 20 years and nobody knows what they are some of them are dead but no relatives visited them also political distance the so-called group 15 they called G15 again they were in jail within that week that's September 11th like that and nobody knows where they are most of them are presumed to be dead so this is how the only crime that the journalists did was they interviewed those dissident groups so it's pretty much that that's an African one so to speak where there's no democracy there's no personal human rights although human rights I'm still international I'm from time to time so I want to invite the people who are watching if you have questions or comments please type them in whether you're on zoom or facebook I also want to mention that there will be an event this evening at seven if you are watching from within the general area there will be an in-person event at seven o'clock tonight at the Highland Park pavilion I want to sort of throw a question to all of you I so appreciated John particularly your your comments and you said that the way that the media has itself been attacked and delegitimized that it makes many people who look to the media for information as you said we feel uncertain in our souls that it's not just a question of access to information but also how it undermines the confidence that our neighbors that we ourselves might feel to take action to make change and and so I wanted to ask any or all of you about your relationships with the people who are listening to your radio show reading your articles or watching your television programs how are you feeling about how they are feeling about their access to knowledge and their opportunities to take action to change their lives for for the better serene please I think a lot about the rising conspiracy theory culture I think about I think that independent journalism needs to have a code and so often we see people stepping into youtube and podcast spaces and bringing those conspiracy theories to light and not really giving them context or sharing this sort of fake news and that is that so much more power because the codes that journalists whether independent or legacy live by have been delegitimized whether externally by government actors or even internally I think a lot about the ways in which the values or so-called values of objectivity are used to kind of keep journalists from stepping into the fray and saying we're going to be really transparent about where this comes from and the ways in which that's being used against us and I really am scared about conspiracy theory culture that that scares me because I'm seeing I mean and not just when we talk about things like COVID or anything else but just the ways in which it means communication is almost weak it's almost impossible to have two-way communication right now because people are learning from completely different schools of thought not just textbooks I think a lot about right now critical race theory is something that I think has a lot of pertinence to the discussions we have is something we should be teaching it is it's something I specialized in as a academic and in my work and I think the fact that so many are banning that discussion it scares me because it means that we're going to have I mean in Minnesota for example if we've got Minneapolis and St. Paul some of the inner ring suburbs making sure to center a critical race theory discussion and we've got parts of rural Minnesota banning that discussion then we're going to have an electorate that is not even in the same pedagogy let alone or speaking the same language I mean that's scary and again I think it comes from attacks on the media attacks on academia you know schools and academia it comes from all these and and that's scary it's it honestly scares the heck out of me anyone else you see the impact of what you're hearing from people who are listening reading John please sort of you know in this not quite the center but it's very close to the center of the power coming forth is where you'll be coming constantly come across people who are dissatisfied in one way or another and why shouldn't the stream of ideas isn't well multi as multi polarity and great this will settle out because the the media has undergone affiliation legacy media is undergone affiliation to government that's cute there's never a war they don't like whereas social media has a beauty a great beauty so you take facebook you know this is a phenomenon facebook I'm speaking of or other not the management the management class just affiliated with certain aspects of government the beauty of facebook is that we put pictures of our kids we talk about what we're going to do we get groups together we discuss ideas in the flow of information can be pretty constant and hints hints that are addition which you can follow up to the level of your curiosity and time it has a great beauty and also it has the flaws and the beauty of being human so sometimes we reach about some appeals and say well you know something you know some silliness that we go on suddenly a we bitch about each other and that's fine because it you know that the tensions the communal tensions need communal space to flow out and amalgamate if necessary but they need to space the flow out so it's very good those things and there are many of them I think they're not social media mess it's social media outlets but that's one the other one is that with the failures of government policies in so many areas in the of liberalism awards that I spoke of previously and the support government has received and continues to receive from legacy media that and our understanding the distinction to our understanding so for example we lived in the Haitian border down in in miami and people print home there women bring home the shopping in a in the supermarket trolley here's rattling down the street there's cars everywhere on saturday or friday night they get very enthusiastic and fire pistols or shotguns into the air like that but but then you go uptown to to miami and you see rich is unparalleled but compressed but rich is just an extraordinary work beyond the streets lined with gold so we know those two items characters are in tremendous tension with each other and one only comes at the expense of the other we know however when we look at the newspapers or watch tv they carry on about some dispute or other but nowhere do we see oh this is a situation where there's 40 million people on food stamps the tensions that's creating in the society the adoption adoption of what you might call unfounded conspiracy theories as to that why it's happening the adoption of those and on the other hand um wealth has this almost bulletproof perimeter that we find hard to analyze unless you're psychologically curious so really hard to analyze and that tremendous tension between those two things provokes us to cause a miasma of disbelief that's what happened but i have no criticism of the phenomenon of people manifested in social media it's quite wonderful for human beings to exchange ideas photographs of the kids picture of a puppy dog big plants and so it's great she'll uh i i i hate to put you on the spot but i'm going to that before we started the conversation you told me that you had covered a trump rally or a trump or rally in wisconsin yesterday uh it was it was a week ago yeah and and the complexities that that raised for you yeah so um the thing is that um this relates to what you were saying so this um in terms of conspiracy theory particularly the the particular conspiracy or like to be less political about it the people that believe that the 2020 election was stolen and and because of what happened on january 6 many of those uh people that were saying about the voting machines etc got deep platform including uh Donald Trump including Mike Ladoe many many voices got banned from twitter and facebook and other and youtube and google and they just got deep platform across the board so what we have right now is these alternative platforms that are popping up that are like rumble and like these other sort of sites like apps that people are going to for their uses completely separate uh source of information source of networking uh source of everything um and so you know it was it was uh you know when i was talking to people at this rally interestingly people wanted to talk to me some people wouldn't but they they had no problem telling me about their what they truly believed which was that china hacked the voting machines and produced the election results um and and various other you know beliefs um and you know and meanwhile the you know people that were up on stage were talking about how horrible journalists are and you know and and it was a little bit scary actually like during these interviews and like there was this like such a negative you know rhetoric about news media and i did have one person like like scream at me and told me to get away from her and i had to go hide the media tent for a while so anyway it's just um i think that it has reached it has escalated the distrust of the media has escalated so much especially with the de-platforming of certain voices that the schism is growing even wider than it was before and it's even harder for uh for the journalists to be able to present the news for people to trust institutions like the media like the cdc like uh you know you know these things that in the past who would have thought that we wouldn't believe what the director of the cdc told us was primary public health information but now we are in a situation where people do not believe that top health person so how do we fix it i do not know well that's a good lead into the first question that's come in from folks out there watching and that is is there a shifting sense that legacy media and citizens journalism are becoming more respectful of each other given some of the realities of social media and particularly uh things like the awarding of an honorary Pulitzer to Darnell Fraser um does that i think it's worth it why did that happen what does that indicate um serene i can see on your face please say say something first of all let me say that i really hate the word citizen journalism and this is somebody who used to run an organization that really prided itself on its citizen journalism i think it's a very exclusionary term and it leaves a lot of undocumented people and people without citizenship out of the conversation so i want to replace that word with independent and community journalism because i just think that's a much more inclusive conversation we have i think i don't think it's a growing respect or understanding and i also think that Darnell Fraser as a separate note should be held up and i think awarding a Pulitzer to somebody who was thinking about who was witnessing somebody be murdered yes it was life-changing and i also think it's a distraction from the failures of media to report on things like the murder of George Floyd or the death of Dwonte Wright or anything else and i think it shifts the responsibility to say oh look they she did the job they did the job we can count on citizen journalism or community journalism to stand up without actually looking internally at the mistakes that we make in the field i think that i'm seeing maybe less of a growing understanding or respect and more of a growing admission that we're all here to stay and i think we're seeing more and more resources going into community and independent media and i'm seeing that be very frustrating to legacy media who want to know why we get the grants or why the sponsorship happens are any of those things i think there's that sort of how can we adopt what they're doing so we're seeing a lot of legacy media for example become 501c3 non-profits which is a structure that's very traditional to independent community media and i think that there is this sense that we in some ways have to learn from each other's playbook if we're going to be able to operate but i and i think there are some community journalists and community journalism organizations that are kind of lauded as we we like what they're doing um but i think by and large it's more of uh i guess we're just going to have to deal with each other i for a long time i was the youngest person in the capital press room here in the minnesota state legislature back when i was an intern back when i was 20 years old and i could never get a questioning because i was always the young kid at the back of the room and now it's a lot easier for me to get a space on that table because just sort of like she's not going to leave us alone or they're just going to be here so we got to make we got to deal with it and so i don't know if that's respect i don't know if it'll lead to respect but i do think it's um it's nice to just not be ignored anymore which is uh which is nice in that of itself thank you and anyone else you know i think um since you know wiki leaks has been around since 2006 and what wiki leaks you know wiki leaks sort of model like this sort of underlying idea was uh to have source documents available to not just legacy media or corporate media but also independent media independent journalists and even you know real people and give them the opportunity to make decisions based on informing themselves educating themselves you know to make better lives for themselves so if you take you know if you go along and follow you know the trajectory of wiki leaks and and independent journalism wiki leaks really opened up journalism for independent journalists they were able to you know what was leaks were basically you know monopolized by um legacy media like all the all the biggest leaks happened through legacy media and and independent journalists weren't able to you know they could report on the reportage but they couldn't you know access the leaks and things themselves so it was all sent to a very uh you know a small lens but after wiki leaks then you know the the releases were open to everyone as an archive so you had journalists all around the world uh you know looking into these files you know from uh you know in Tunisia they um you know they found a cable uh that showed that the Tunisian leader didn't have the support of the of the US government and that led to a to uh them being overthrowed so you know it's it's these sort of this open source of like uh crowd sourced um journalism this sort of uh give you know given rise and and to to more and more independent journalism and I think just um to go back to you know how do we build trust I mean that is um you're you're not just saying opinions you're not just saying oh this is the way it is you're actually providing the source material which is a way to build trust uh with you know saying this this is true I think a lot of trust was lost you know during you know especially around the Iraq war period where uh you know that that you know those lies were propagated to to into that war um and and so then all these leaks and and things came out from related from those those lies and those wars and people were able to see see through you know what what the media the media was complicit in these sort of things and so a lot of trust was lost in the media not in especially in legacy institutional media so you know that they have to work to earn it back otherwise independent media will just keep growing and growing and uh and and their audience share will just shrink and shrink uh you know coming from a very different angle talking about an existing institution of media you know so to speak a lesson of tables but I can't from a country with no private media so the only media that they are is a government media and only the only there's only one radio one newspaper and almost no social media that's why I was trying to say that's supposed to be a authoritarian regime so after I came here yes I can see that the diversity media's you know from independence you can classify them like the liberal conservative and all that stuff unfortunately we don't have that with you it was strictly the worst place to be in from a government just like I said in jail for 20 years still there and nobody knows whether they still alive or not so I can see uh I can be to look at things from a very critical point of view that I spent so much time exposing the tyrants so it was just uh I can see that we need to be there as a witness we need to get one day which we can see that we have 10 15 that private media well we can compare one from the other I think but this is interesting it's not interesting it's horrible but you know what's happening with Julian's case is it's being held up by this totalitarian regimes and authoritarian regimes so when they're confronted about you know journalists being imprisoned or tortured in their countries like Azerbaijan you know he was confronted like well you know what your your freedom of press is horrendous torture journalists you jailed journalists he answered back to the BBC reporter well you can't lecture me look at what you're doing to Julian Assange the Chinese foreign affairs spokesperson they were confronted about their press freedoms in China and you know they responded you can't lecture us look what you're doing you've got a journalist publisher in jail in the UK UK the UK Russian ambassador was confronted about now bounty he said you know you can't say anything to us about that and puts down the road you've got a publisher and journalists in prison as well so I think Julian's Julian's predicament and his fight is is something that you know if something is done about it if these prosecutions discontinue it sends a message all around the world to these places where you know that places that don't have the rights that we have you know that the United States government can and then you know take them all high ground when pressuring these places to have you know more open press more human rights more press freedom because at the moment they're just having a song so I want to tell one story and actually about a project that was researched here and has just reached the culmination and that is two high school seniors we're doing a national history day project and they were they they had learned about and someone I knew nothing about an African-American woman named Ethel Payne who was the first black woman in the White House press corps and she'd come from the Chicago defender maybe in some ways the Chicago defender is the equivalent of what we're calling community journalism and independent journalism at that time in 1954 to go to Washington DC and she immediately got into a ongoing argument with President Eisenhower about why was Eisenhower advocating for the development of an interstate highway system without including a regulation that there could not be Jim Crow transportation in the federal highway system and so you know like Serene saying about being in the room and how people here is the first black woman to be accepted into the White House press corps and she immediately starts a fight and and she takes an issue that would affect people all over the United States including here at the time of the building of interstate 94 and the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and and here are these two 17-year-old white high school kids creating a 10-minute documentary video about Ethel Payne and they won first prize in the state of Minnesota their video has now been shown at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and they've taken sixth prize nationally I'd like I need to know what prizes one through five were about because I can't imagine how it could get any better than that but you know the idea of journalists as fighters as journalists as taking risk journalists as standing up for what they think is right there's a good long history of that around the world not not just in the United States and I'm thrilled that these kids found the resources here at these freedom library to tell that story so I'm so pleased to read what you showed a link with that task oh sure though we've I've posted it on our Facebook page but sure no I'll send you the link it's the best 10 minutes you'll spend yeah so I want to maybe close with this question that's come in from one of our viewers to John and Gabriel and it's a good time to for us here and people watching to think about this what's the most important thing that you think that we can do here in Minnesota to further Julian's cause and and what can we be doing to open more doors for more tourists so we've been talking to people about feeling all over the country it's just you know getting in touch with their congresspeople and telling them you know that they care about this case that you know that they care about their first amendment rights their democratic rights they care about their press freedoms and that they want you know they want their congresspeople to to do something about it that's what we sort of we find that you know if we can if people can work locally and actually something locally then you know you get much better momentum things like that one example was in Australia there was an electorate or a district and they had a local they got a local petition together and in Australia we've got a support of Sarge Parliamentary Group so there's 24 26 MPs actually the parliamentarians who are in the group that support you know the dropping of the charges against Julian and this petition was to petition a local member to join that group and you know so the petition was put together locally put in local businesses they got people together you know I think it was like five or six hundred signatures and they gave that to the MP and that MP then joined the support of Sarge Group so they now have that petition they now have that grouping of all the numbers and people on that thing so now they can organise locally and and you know for other issues or even further pushing for a Sarge to be free so that that was one sort of example that you know it's interesting on you know it doesn't take much to to move things you know with your neighbours and friends I think that's that what was it the local constituents of the representative yes yes so it was a local constituents so it's maybe from that electorate that or you know districts I think you call them in congressional districts yeah the other with journalism you know the journalist will rise up to the challenge and use if use facilities like Petrion or Substance that will create space and enthusiasm so a little bit of money coming from the investigation publish that there are many in Substance I know because I've read it to you each day of the Greenhouse and Petrion I read for a couple of other writers medium I also read so there's three avenues for encouragement and creation deeper more well that's something a deeper and vigorous journalism class thank you so um we'll wrap up I I want to encourage everyone uh to follow up to listen to radical news hour on KFNU W excuse me WFNU Frogtown Radio and also the uptake to look for Sheila's byline whether it's in the Guardian or something much closer to home to read African global and follow Petrion's work in the diasporic East African community and if you're available this evening come and listen to more of John and Gabriel and talk as they talk about Julian's case and follow us at the East Side Freedom Library um maybe I'll I'll end with this tomorrow night um we will be hosting uh professor Carlos Hill who was a student of mine more than 20 years ago and is now chairperson of African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and has just published a book on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and I continue to say that it's a very significant thing that President Biden went to Tulsa and explicitly said that what had happened in Tulsa a hundred years ago was not a riot but that it was a massacre and I think to some degree all of us up here believe that words matter and the choice of the word massacre as opposed to the use of the word riot is very significant and it didn't happen by accident it's been years of some of those shady people with PhDs that we've been talking about and and others who who have said uh you can't call this a riot this was a massacre and you should pay attention to it so tomorrow night Carlos Hill will be with us with his new book on Tulsa he will be with us of course virtue but tune in and continue to follow our work here at the East Side Freedom Library thank you Carla and Clarence for your work on this and again thank you to our colleagues at Women Against Military Madness for making this event possible and thank you all for participating thank you thank you