🗞️ We’re all Georgia Fort

As a mom, I trembled when I heard independent journalist Georgia Fort at the Knight Media Forum talking about the night in January when federal agents came to arrest her at her home for doing her job. Her daughters were at the house, and they were afraid in the context of violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in Minnesota.

Fort pleaded innocent to felony charges in connection to her reporting and filming of a protest last January inside a St. Paul, MN, church; its pastor works for ICE. Since she couldn’t talk about her legal case, Fort spoke about how she had to document her own detention.

Unlike Don Lemon, a former CNN journalist who also faces criminal charges in connection to coverage, Fort wasn’t a nationally known figure.  While Fort’s mother asked questions to the agents through the door, Fort filmed what she could to share it with other journalists, so it would be clear that she IS a journalist. 

She is a highly respected independent journalist in Minnesota, a three-time Midwest Emmy winner, founder of BLCK Press, and president of the Center for Broadcast Journalism. As I listened to her speak, it struck me that she had to split herself into so many different pieces that night: she had to be a journalist, a mom, a daughter; she had to think as the founder of an organization, and she also thought about her community, her sources, and her responsibility to protect them in the event of a search warrant.

For many community-rooted independent journalists — especially women — there can be no separation between the personal and the professional, the individual and the collective, when state power shows up at our door. There are many Georgia Forts out there: independent journalists, Emmy winners, mothers, daughters, founders, community members, producers. I know how strong we can be when we show up with all the pieces that make us into who we are.

—Valeria Fernández, Altavoz Lab Founder and Executive Director 

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