Pikeville, Kentucky – Local media outlets are speaking out after they received emails from a state police spokesperson demanding that they wait for a press release from the police department before publishing stories about ongoing investigations, which implies that the outlets are prohibited from using a narrative that is different from the one chosen by police.
The Mountain Advocate newspaper and a Bell County radio station received an email from Kentucky State Police spokesman Shane Jacobs, in which he started out by writing that he personally has “a great working relationship with the media,” but that all of the inquiries he receives from media contacts take time away from his personal life and add to his apparently busy schedule.
Good afternoon, I would like to start out by saying that I feel I have a great working relationship with the media in our area. I work many hours and sometimes on my days off to relay information to the media outlets. I want you guys to know I do have a personal life and sometimes I can’t respond to your e-mails as quick as you would like. I am out of town at times spending it with my family. I have trainings, State Fair Trooper Island, and other events I have to attend which causes me to be out of town also.
Jacobs then demanded that the media outlets wait until an official press release is sent to them before including any details of an ongoing investigation in published stories, social media posts, or on the radio. He claimed the goal was to keep from spreading “inaccurate information from Sheriff’s or anyone else,” and threatened that if the media outlets did not follow his demands, they would be removed from his distribution list.
From this point forward when KSP is working an investigation, you are to wait until OUR (KSP) press release is sent out before putting anything out on social media, radio, and newspaper. No more posting inaccurate information from Sherrif’s or anyone else. I don’t care to confirm something and then get a release out later. Authority of my supervisors, if this continues, you will be taken off our media distribution list. Thanks Shane.
After the publication received the warning, Mountain Advocate publisher Jay Nolan responded by calling out Kentucky State Police for refusing to honor an “independent, free press” that works with law enforcement agencies “to keep the public fully informed and protected.”
“For the KSP to tell us we can only report what the KSP says when they want to say it, and we must ignore any and all other sources, that’s crazy,” Nolan said. “Any professional journalist would consider a publicly elected law enforcement professional like our Sheriff as a credible source. Sheriff Smith has 27 years of law enforcement experience, 24 of which with KSP itself. To tell us we can’t quote someone like him, or an eyewitness, or a local police chief? And, for them to threaten us with removal from their media list is at best misguided.”
Brian O’Brien, President and General Manager of The Big One 106.3FM WRIL radio station, also received a copy of the email from police spokesman Jacobs, and he argued that the media has a duty to the public to provide responsible, timely reports on incidents—even if that includes reports on an ongoing investigation that the police department hasn’t written a press release about.
“When I received the email I was very surprised. I have worked for decades to establish a rapport with law enforcement when reporting issues facing the community. While I can’t speak for any other media, I do feel that most of us do our utmost to check sources and present our coverage in a respectful manner,” O’Brien said.
In a letter to the KSP commissioner, David Thompson, executive director of the Kentucky Press Association, said he believes the demands in the emails raise “serious First Amendment and other legal issues,” therefore “the officer’s threat is not acceptable.”
“This is nothing less than an unconstitutional and illegal attempt to restrict access to KSP information because a media outlet has published information that has (displeased) the state police,” Thompson wrote.
Rachel Blevins is an independent journalist from Texas, who aspires to break the false left/right paradigm in media and politics by pursuing truth and questioning existing narratives. Follow Rachel on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Steemit and Patreon. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.
qualified privilege expires if you cease acting in good faith
What do you mean? You agree with media waiting for police okay to investigate and write a story? Not good.
GFY….
Let’s hope they don’t comply.
FTP
Who believes the media anyway? This will just ensure the police state has things properly covered up before the public finds out anything.
As Orwell predicted – The Ministry of Truth has arrived or better stated – has outed itself.
I’ve tried to get the news media to report on the criminal activities of police/ government many years ago and found it to be totally controlled. Instead of reporting the truth they did everything to make me out to be the bad guy.
Your news media has been totally controlled for years. That is all part of how communism/ satanism works. Someday, you will learn as I have, that you have no government protecting you. It is all organized crime! Google ‘who runs America’ to get an idea of how far down the toilet we are.
They are committing Terrorist acts across the Globe and blaming all sorts of innocent groups all in the name of achievement of a One World Government and Military.
They’re coming for this country real soon they want our Guns. So they can walk right in take us over.
Just look at all the young school children doing ‘walk-outs’ and ‘lay-ins’ across the country today. And, of course, MSM is ALL over it. Where are the minds, the critical thinking of these children’s parents? So, yeah, these children’s generation will be even more enslaven than any of the other generations alive today. Those that are left after Agenda 21 that is. Great comment!
There are at least two major ‘problems’ with the theory of disarming for takeover. The most obvious is that we are already taken over, behaving as we are programmed to do. This behavior is our participation in/cooperation with a system they invented and control, especially the toxic consumer orgy, income tax, and system of interest-bearing debt, designed to steal a good portion of the income and wealth produced by work and flow it to the top. The process maintains Elite power ongoingly. Worse, it comes at the cost of our source of life, which is liquidated—raped and toxified—and converted to commodities.
A second problem is the difference between the weaponry available to each ‘side.’ In earlier times, the Elite had access to conventional weaponry. Now, however, with ‘exotic’ weapons, they can kill you without you ever even seeing anything to shoot at, from a range that makes the range of the arms we “bear” seem like slingshots and peashooters. I even suspect that they can turn the wireless antenna towers into weapons.
The genocide going on now in US I call the ‘Illness/Slow-Genocide Agenda.’ Fast genocide is not nearly as profitable as the toxin-driven one that first drives you through the medical merry-go-round on the way to your grave. And now add wireless technology, which is terminally pathogenic, including mass ecocide, a siren song of seduction. People embrace it without a thought, for convenience and entertainment. Such mindlessness is an illness/death warrant. One of the greatest blows we could strike is the total rejection of ALL wireless technology, which, with the coming 5G, nanotech, Smart tech, and AI, forms the foundation and mechanism of the Elite’s surveillance/police state and human-control system, a la Orwell on techno-steroids. Talk about control, the technology exists now to read thoughts and feelings remotely and alter them for behavior control – digital push-button control.
I believe you are absolutely correct. Read my comment above yours.
Organized crime is the correct wording in my opinion anticriminals. Why I refer to all centralized power as a kakistocracy.
Funny thing is that the police have no right to do such a thang.
the media for the most part is pro government, its rare to find an investigative reporter any-more, if a news source speaks out or exposes corruption, the rats in the major media swarm over them as conspiracy theorists
The media for the most part is pro LIBERAL/Marxist/Democrat government. Mainstream news is just a division of the DNC at this point.
CNN and the NY times is at the verge of going belly up, alternative media ratings is growing in leaps and bounds
That’s very good news!
Woot! But, the propaganda arm of the kakistocracy will not go quietly into the night. The attack on alternative media, web sites, content providers, and web service providers will ensue sooner rather than later in my estimation. Great point, let’s hope they all fail first.
I report anything I want, anytime I want. Someone has to report the police breaking the laws
Two things in play here. The first is clearly evident. The government schools are not educating the common citizen about the Bill of Rights. The second factor is more arcane. A police force is a corporate entity administered under Contract Law and not necessarily bound by Constitutional restraints. And they are constantly testing the boundaries of what they can get away with. Find an online source like Vimeo for the documentary “Take Back Your Power” for a better explanation of how your rights are disappearing without a shot fired in aggression.
I will definitely find and watch “Take Back Your Power”. Thankee Joel WS.
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Throw out the 1st amendment.
WTG coppers.
Get rid of the Captain and whom ever was responsible for this b.s.
Jacobs is just another useless human being, another useful idiot. Drunk on power after swearing an oath to ‘the united states’ of America. Not to Americans mind you, the bankrupt and insolvent Fed, whom takes orders from their debtor masters. Pathetic.
All government is a conspiracy against the people. The bigger the government the bigger the conspiracy. Government is attacking us. Stop funding government.