i had to. i was watching TV on Saturday Night. 11pm news.

when you’re not distracted by your phone and laptop you actually watch things. its crazy.

the nice lady on TV said “a radio reporter was arrested tonight in Compton…”

LA is huge but it’s also teeny tiny. I totally expected to see Claudia Peschiutta being escorted to the pokey because, like, me, she is not afraid to tell Authorities when they are wrong wrong wrong and let’s count the ways they are wrong.

the last person i thought id see on my screen was Josie Huang.

But there was Josie, screaming to the fuzz who she worked for, that she was a journalist and how this was wrong.

Shockingly on the LA Sheriff Dept’s Twitter account was a three-part tweet that claimed she “admitted” she didn’t have the “proper” press credentials AND that she had no ID.

Josie? one of the most prepared and organized reporters you’ll ever cross paths with?

we are to believe that Josie drove all the way down to compton to go to a hospital where two deputies are recovering from gunshots to the head and she didn’t bring a press pass or her work ID?

technically, there is no requirement for a press credential to practice journalism. Many in the press simply have business cards but even that is not required to be protected by the first amendment the same way you don’t need a document to speak.

press passes are typically offered to make things easier for law enforcement or other officials to determine who is press in tense situations where yelling and pointing aren’t always easy to do. or in this case its shown to hospital staff to help prove why you are there. unfortunately it doesn’t guarantee entry or access but it doesn’t hurt.

but on the sidewalk, a public sidewalk, the minute Josie identified herself to the deputies they should have respected her in the exact same way law enforcement wants to be respected when they identify themselves in situations.

secondly, she had her ID flapping from her neck, laminated, and visible, so fuck your fucking bullshit tweet. delete it.

i hate lies so much that i created this blog.

and on this blog i wrote “nothing in here is true” that way if i wanted to lie, i could and no one could say they were tricked.

the irony is on many posts the only lie is “nothing in here is true”

the Law, however should always be trusted. and their tweets should be Gospel. video proves that all three of these tweets are false.

on a day where two deputies were shot in the head at point blank range the public should be united in trying to find the shooter. instead, due to these lies and the way Josie was treated, the emotions are more complicated than they should be and respect for the LA sheriff’s dept is not 100%.

that is fucked. and it’s nobody’s fault other than the department, which currently doesn’t have the greatest track record.

is there a solution? there’s always a solution.

here a former journalist should be in charge of that twitter account. they should be paid $150k and there should be zero rush to put out information. especially if it is in regards to someone, like a journalist, who has video of the arrest and the events leading up to it, and if there are, oh I dont know, tv cameras showing reverse angles and such.

because this will only make the department look worse when the truth comes out.

but heres the problem.

we currently live in a country where the President of the United States has convinced a healthy chunk of the populace that the press is not to be trusted. also ironic since he has lied to the nation over 20,000 times from petty topics like crowd size of his inauguration to deadly things like how the coronavirus is spread.

therefore something eye opening happened when on twitter word spread of Josie’s arrest:

the majority of the public didn’t believe her.

despite the videos, despite the ACLU, journalism unions, journalism orgs, her workplace, other journalists who were there, asswipes like me… sooooo many people on twitter said nonsense like “that’ll teach her for getting in the way of deputies.” “she wanted to be The story, well she got what she wanted.”

it blew me away. which is hard to do because i have been on Twitter for a little while now.

but it taught me an incredibly important lesson.

for some idealistic reason i have always believed that if so much popular opinion is against me on Twitter, there’s something i could have done better, different, more clear that would have prevented so much negativity.

but here Josie did nothing wrong. there were multiple camera angles. things were clear. hell, we could even see the deputies trying to smash her camera to destroy the evidence that they had illegally manhandled her and interfered with HER job, not the other way around.

and yet the public saw this gold dress as a red one.

it did not help that the Sheriff Dept shit in the punchbowl with its tweets. despite the fact that this is a department who just recently was exposed for incredibly bad behavior. there are members of the public who will always take the side of the law over the press even if the video is right in front of them and there are jerks like me who will confront them on twitter telling them that they are wrong wrong wrong.

plugging back in for a day taught me just another reason why i should unplug for a week.

my beloved social channels are infested with pollution that in many ways is man made.

and its good to rehab for a while and get that gunk out of your system before diving headfirst back into it for the rest of this year.