{"id":187586,"date":"2011-05-09T18:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T23:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/05\/09\/at-least-this-wasnt-the-obama-administrations-coverup\/"},"modified":"2011-05-09T18:12:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T23:12:00","slug":"at-least-this-wasnt-the-obama-administrations-coverup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/05\/09\/at-least-this-wasnt-the-obama-administrations-coverup\/","title":{"rendered":"At Least This Wasn&#8217;t the Obama Administration&#8217;s Coverup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this case, it&#8217;s big Ag (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beatrice_Foods\">We&#8217;re Beatrice<\/a>), who have been leaning on their running dog lackeys in state legislators to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ecocentricblog.org\/2011\/05\/06\/ag-gag-rules-meet-the-farmarazzi\/\">pass laws to make the taking of photographs, videos, and recordings of farms illegal<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>So, proposed legislation in three states \u2013 Iowa, Minnesota and Florida \u2013 that would criminalize the filming, photography or audio recording of farms (the general assumption seems to be that the bills are meant to protect CAFOs \u2013 concentrated animal feeding operations, also referred to as factory farms \u2013  but could apply to any farm of any nature) raised a major red flag to me, and to others who follow and write about such issues. People you\u2019d expect to raise a protest, like Humane Society\u2019s Wayne Pacelle and Animal Welfare Approved director Andrew Guenther have done so, but mainstream media, especially the New York Times, has also done a great job, with this pointed op-ed and Mark Bittman\u2019s excellent \u201cWho Protects the Animals?\u201d (in which he coins the phrase \u201cag-gag\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I guess that I shouldn&#8217;t be surprised, considering the popularity of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Veggie_libel\">veggie libel laws<\/a>, but the pure venality and hypocrisy here just boggles my mind.<\/p>\n<p>I would hope that the courts declare this unconstitutional before the ink is dry, because it is banning the practice of journalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this case, it&#8217;s big Ag (We&#8217;re Beatrice), who have been leaning on their running dog lackeys in state legislators to pass laws to make the taking of photographs, videos, and recordings of farms illegal: So, proposed legislation in three states \u2013 Iowa, Minnesota and Florida \u2013 that would criminalize the filming, photography or audio &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1029,971,970,1051,1129,1020,1103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-civil-rights","category-corruption","category-hypocrisy","category-journalism","category-legislation","category-secrecy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}