Foot-dragging in Marion raid investigation should fill public with dread

 Via The Kansas Reflector

June 3, 3024

"I’ve had it.

Nearly 10 months after law enforcement officials raided the Marion County Record and two private residences, officials have yet to tell us the results of their investigations. That’s nearly a full year since a flagrant assault on free speech in Kansas, one signed off on by a list of city, county and state officials. True, a handful of individuals implicated in the scandal have left their roles in the intervening time. Lawsuits have been filed.

But we have not heard from those in charge. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, perhaps realizing it had been compromised by involvement in the raid, passed the entire affair over to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. They originally said results would come in April. We’re at the beginning of June, and those results still haven’t come.

Our First Amendment rights, those shared by both journalists and the entire American public, deserve better."

Read the full article here.

And background here, and here.

Mark Peterson Photographs For The New York Times Magazine

A pro-Palestinian protest on Columbia University’s campus this spring

Credit: Mark Mark Peterson

Via The New York Times Magazine

May 29, 2024

"When private universities set rules for what speech they allow, including when, where and how students can protest, they can impose more restrictions than the First Amendment allows in public spaces. But for decades, they have claimed free speech as a central value, and that promise has a particular history at Columbia. In 1968, the administration called in the police to evict student demonstrators from Hamilton Hall, which they had occupied in protest of the university’s involvement in military research and a new neighborhood-dividing gymnasium project in Morningside Park. For more than half a century now, campus activism and universities’ responses to it have mostly occurred within the paradigm shaped by 1968. But the upheavals on campuses across the country this spring were different. The campus war over the real war in Gaza did something no issue since Vietnam had done. It seemed to have prompted an abrupt rethinking of free-speech principles that many in academia assumed to be foundational.

For the first time since the Vietnam War, university demonstrations have led to a rethinking of who sets the terms for language in academia." ---full article

 

Grant Baldwin's 2019 Pride Festival image featured: Officials in counties outside Charlotte censored LGBTQ+ content. Can they do that?

 Via The Charlotte Observer

August 18, 2022

The Gaston County manager ordered this photograph of two newlywed men kissing at the 2019 Charlotte Pride Parade & Festival pulled from a photography exhibit at the Gaston County Museum, according to a county statement and the photographer, Grant Baldwin/Grant Baldwin Photography

"Before the pandemic put a pause to the Queen City’s in-person festivities, Charlotte Pride hired local photojournalist Grant Baldwin to document its 2019 parade. Among the shots, Baldwin snapped a portrait of two men — Justin Colasacco and Bren Hipp — kissing in celebration just after getting engaged.

As a rainbow-festooned gaggle of cheers erupted behind them, Baldwin thought the shot would be perfect for the Gaston County Museum’s roundup of artistic and documentary photographs. Museum officials agreed initially. They accepted the photo and displayed it as part of the summer 2022 “Into the Darkroom” exhibit, Baldwin said. Ultimately, county manager Kim Eagle told museum staff to replace the photograph with one “more considerate of differing viewpoints in the community,” county spokesman Gaub said. It remains shelved, but the removal has sparked calls for more LGBTQ recognition in the county. It garnered praise for Baldwin and the couple elsewhere. The photo will take a place of honor in a New Mexico exhibit soon. “It’s reaffirmed in me that there’s still more work to be done to live up to the motto of Gastonia being an All-American city – live, work and play – when a subset of the population is not viewed as equals,” Charlotte Pride spokesman and Gastonia resident Clark Simon said. “So there’s more work to be done.”

Read more here

Grant Baldwin's photograph is featured in the exhibition "Imagine A World Without Photojournalism", on view through September 18, 2022.