Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest

KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name.

Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message — as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.”

“Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression.

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