 action & events PREVIEW! Read the F.A.Q. from the coming RNC '08 Report website!
F.A.Q. - Frequently-asked questions from the RNC '08 Report website. 1. What is the RNC '08 Report archive project? This website exists to provide a citizen's archive of media reports, government documents, and other resources relating to the 2008 Republican National Convention. The source material posted on this website will ultimately used to compile a truly independent, publicly available, citizen's report on what happened during the 2008 RNC. If we are to address what happened, the public needs to have access to as much primary source material as possible--including camera footage from both police and city car and street camera videotapes. This archive exists to compile and freely offer the broadest possible scope of source materials which will help members of the public, researchers, and decision-makers of all kinds to work out exactly what happened.
Not every source. For example, articles or reports primarily concerned with the Convention agenda, delegates, or speeches in the X'cel Convention Center would only be included if they included significant material related to the primary focus of this archive project. Other than these obvious exclusions, we're here to archive any content—from police press conferences to protester pot luck speeches, from commercial media reports to Joe or Jane Citizen with a camera. There are no doubt many key primary sources that we have not even considered. Browse the site, search the site, let us know what's missing. 3. Can I submit my own material about the RNC as a source? Yes! We are looking for video footage, still photographs, audio interviews, protest art, and anything else you would like to make a case for. If you have original footage you can digitize, contact us for video dimension specs as we're heading for a higher quality than You Tube. Quicktime, MPEG-4 and FLV files are fine. For photographic images, please feel free to send us annotated image sets detailing what we are looking at and where and when it was taken. We can professionally resize those for you for the site. We can also add a credit and link to your website. We are not currently adding pages to our site whose content only consists of a link to an external multimedia file. From bitter experience due to unreliable longevity of multimedia on many websites, we are trying to avoid one of the main frustrations that defeats the purpose of an archiving project. From our point of view, it is preferable to do the work to capture, encode and archive it locally, than trying to keep abreast of which external multimedia links have expired and having to deal with the need to delete a previously listed and cross-linked reference resource. 4. Who created the RNC '08 Report website? Minneapolis resident Nigel Parry, who has lived for seven years in the Twin Cities since 1998, including 5 years at the Tilsner Artists' Cooperative in Lowertown, St. Paul, where he was based during the RNC. Nigel's background is in journalism, website design, and public relations, with a focus on independent reporting and the nonprofit community. From the West Bank Palestinian town of Ramallah, Nigel created the first alternative news website in a war zone in 1996. In 2003, he coordinated Iraq War coverage and new media publishing with an unembedded team of independent journalists on the ground in Baghdad during "Shock & Awe."
The project, Electronic Iraq, and its 2001 sister project The Electronic Intifada won the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Voices of Peace Award "in recognition of [their] commitment to bringing the concerns, voices, and experiences of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples to audiences the world over via the Internet." Both sites received requests from the Library of Congress and the British Library to be archived in their permanent digital archives. For his day job, Nigel Parry offers website, print, and multimedia design through his business nigelparry.net, "award-winning communications solutions for people with something to say". He is also a musician, whose band Pocket of Resistance, is currently playing in the Twin Cities. 5. Why was the RNC '08 Report website created? What made this necessary? Nigel Parry started the RNC '08 Project after seeing St. Paul and the neighborhood in which he lived for 5 years, gratuitously turned into a police state for a week. Journalists and cop-watcher videographers were targeted even before the Convention began. Unmarked cars with police snatch squads prowled our streets. Later in the week, protesters being released from jail were not able to simply walk out the jail doors. Rather they were taken by police in vans and dumped, in random neighborhoods around the city, at all times of the day and night. In plain English, it was a creepy couple of weeks. There is never an excuse for targeting journalists. There is rarely an excuse for riot police, even during large public events. The riot police are the ones you keep round the corner in a van, in case there are any problems. Not so during the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, Minnesota. $50 million of Federal money had been earmarked for security, $36 million for salaries, $14 for new equipment. As the Associated Press reported on September 3rd 2008, the Republican Party's host committee was required by the City of St. Paul "to buy insurance covering up to $10 million in damages and unlimited legal costs for law enforcement officials accused of brutality, violating civil rights and other misconduct." All of this showed. During the first two hours of the Poor People's Rally and March in St. Paul's Mears Park on September 2nd, there were 200-300 people there, 100 of whom were journalists, legal observers and street medics. The organizing group, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, an initiative started by Martin Luther King shortly before his assassination, is a local organization that has held peaceful protests in the Twin Cities for over a decade.
This kind of overkill characterized security deployment during the RNC week, and created a tangible atmosphere of intimidation that discouraged attendance at rallies and other public events, which chilled much of the expected protest around the Convention, and undermined free speech at an event where the free speech of the Convention attendees from the Republican Party was guarded jealously, with cages keeping those who disagreed far away and—as it clearly wasn't the American public's—a private army securing the streets outside. Much of the commercial media coverage was shallow and ceased investigating and following-up events in any meaningful way within a week of the Convention's end. At the same time, there were miles of incredible video tape footage captured by another army—an army of independent journalists and citizen witnesses. Much of this material has not been seen by the public, yet represents a very important part of the story. This website is an attempt to redress some of the imbalances of the news-producing system and offer a space for people to have access to as many sources as possible to understand what happened. While the RNC '08 Report may have been created out of a desire to take a stand and express an implicitly suppressed point of view about police behavior, the resource that has been created out of that angst is a library-quality research archive that offers every point of view—from the 2007 pre-Convention statements of the anarchist group, the RNC Welcoming Committee, to Convention Week TV news broadcasts by Fox 29, the Twin Cities' local Fox News affiliate. You can read the military communication-style transcripts of the protest groups' sector Twitter feeds during Day 1, or find a U.S. Army press release about the deployment of the National Guard from the Department of Defense. The RNC '08 Report believes that true democracy, transparency, and accountability requires widely-available, free, public access to the greatest possible number of information sources and opinions. A healthy dose of reality—and especially of all of reality—helps us to see things as they really are in a world where many people and institutions have a vested interest in making sure that we do not. [ends] The RNC '08 Report is coming soon at http://www.rnc08report.org |
