Back in January, the one-man media-busting army that is Brad Johnson confronted a pack of journalists who’d camped themselves out in front of the home of a man whose pregnant wife has been missing since the winter holiday season. Brad and his wife Sandy live in Modesto, California, which for some ungodly reason seems to attract packs of journalists to tabloid-style stories unlike any other community in America.
The Johnsons also run the Partytown Streaming Network, which provides several free channels of music and news online, including one feed completely dedicated to independent journalism and special IMC protest coverage. Brad was once the broadcast engineer for Clear Channel’s Modesto cluster.
After watching throngs of cameras hover around the scandal of a former congressman a couple of years ago the Johnsons decided they’d seen enough. When this new salacious story broke involving the mystery disappearance of a pregnant woman, the Johnsons were ready for the hordes of cameras.
In January, Brad successfully disrupted a live feed of CNN with media protest messages, and got some air time on a local talk radio station. Now, with new developments in this woman’s case, the media are back in Modesto in force. And Brad is there – we’ll let him tell the rest:
“I protested the corporate media (again) here in Modesto.
About 40 remote TV trucks and crews were blocking the streets of downtown Modesto, most of them there to get the Modesto police station sign in the back ground of the shot while the on air guy reads the same story over and over each newscast, all so focused in on only two dead bodies while over 1000 bodies are on the ground in the mid east from american freedom attacks
This was very hard to do alone, I was able to get my free speech sign on the TV shot for the sacramento stations 5pm live shot, but with only one protester i was not able to ‘shut it down’ per se, much less videotape the media crews hassling me or the police being nice to me……
I did really piss off a few of the crews….seems corporate media don’t like anyone spinning their shots…many of the crew tried to push me out of the way, that didn’t work, I’m a big guy!
A few tried the ‘stand in my face’ thing blocking my every step. (cnn staff did this to me last time) To this I asked him to step back a few times nicely, then yelled at the top of my lungs “PLEASE STEP BACK 3 FEET ! ! !”
Crews that were trying to broadcast jumped in at that point and made him stop, so i would not have to yell again.
3 corporate media crews went in to the police station to ask the police to silence me, the police were totally cool, free speech and all…this was a public street corner and only asked that i keep moving and not just stand still in their shot…
We have all protested before, lets do it again now that the tv crews are lined up like sitting ducks awaiting our message… they won’t come to cover us, we must bring the public’s messages to them!
We have 4 big signs about the corporate media (radio) , i can’t hold them all…. hint hint…”
Skip to content