skippy the bush kangaroo: occupy wall street, lose your job

Friday, October 28, 2011

occupy wall street, lose your job

we told you about the hostess of a public radio opera program who got fired because of her involvement w/#occupywallst (she was since rehired, then the entire program got dumped by npr, subsequently to be distributed by its home station, wdav).

now comes word of caitlan curran, another public radio independant contractor severed employmentally from her job, also because of her involvment w/#ows:

the next day, boing boing co-editor xeni jardin posted the photo [of the author and her protest sign at #ows] as the site's occupy wall street sign of the day, the post circulated around tumblr, [connor] friedersdorf himself saw it and wrote about it, as did felix salmon at reuters, who called me "one of those protestors that photographers dream of" and the sign "true, and accurate, and touching, and grammatical, and far too long to be a slogan, and gloriously bereft of punctuation, and ending even more gloriously in a mildly archaic preposition"…

i thought all of this could be fodder for an interesting segment on the takeaway—a morning news program co-produced by wnyc radio and public radio international—for which i had been working as a freelance web producer roughly 20 hours per week for the past seven months. i pitched the idea to producers on the show, in an e-mail.

the next day, the takeaway's general manager fired me over the phone, effective immediately. he was inconsolably angry, and said that i had violated every ethic of journalism, and that this should be a "teaching moment" for me in my career as a journalist. the segment i had pitched, of course, would not happen. ironically, the following day marketplace did pretty much the exact segment i thought would have been great on the takeaway, with kai ryssdal discussing the sign and the goldman sachs deal it alluded to in terms that were far from neutral.

we agree w/ms. curran when she says:

it's unclear to me how our participation, on our personal time, in a non-partisan movement warrants termination from our jobs. if the protest is so lacking, in terms of message and focus, then how can my involvement with it go against the takeaway's ethical policies? in other words, if i'm associated with a party-less movement (and barely associated, since that was only the second time i've attended an occupy wall street event), and have never exercised bias in editing the takeaway's website, what's the harm?

of course, we all know the answer: equality and fairness is not what this system is about, and the system will not let anyone argue differently.

posted by skippy at 10:26 PM |