Reading a newspaper column about the rioting in Ferguson, I was struck by a passage that could have been written about the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973.
Bob Franken's column said, "Those of us who try to be serious about journalism must get used to, if not embrace, the reality that if we do our job properly, most people won't like us.''
He went on to say that the events in the St. Louis suburb obviously are big news, and big news gets covered. Then the passage that took me back four decades:
"Even so, many of those who call the area home deeply resent all the reporters, videographers and photographers, to say nothing of big satellite trucks, that have descended like a bunch of 'vultures,' a term commonly heard from the locals. The president and prosecutor are merely channeling Americans who believe that those covering the story are irresponsibly promoting trouble with their very presence.
"The vitriol comes from all sides ... ''
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That's how it often felt during the 71 days of the Wounded Knee event. The "sides,'' an inexact term for the main newsmakers in the conflict, were the federal government and the American Indian Movement-led occupiers. The government of tribal President Dick Wilson sometimes allied with the federal Justice Department and Marshal Service and sometimes did not.
The main newsmakers for each of those two or three sides generally tolerated, but didn't much like, the reporters and photographers who were assigned to cover the stand-off for newspapers, radio and television. I don't think they disliked us as individuals. They didn't like the media as a group, even though all sides learned that they could use us to get messages out that, they hoped, would sway public sentiment toward their side.
The mostly forgotten people in that whole confrontation were the locals, the residents who had lived on and near the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation long before 1973 and who would be left to pick up their lives after the FBI agents and AIM leaders and cameras and notebooks had moved on. Those people, Lakota and non-Indian alike, really didn't like the media much. Those people, Lakota and non-Indian alike, seemed to resent the reporters, videographers and photographers and to consider them -- us -- vultures, whether they expressed it that way or not.
More times than I can remember, I heard a local resident say, in these or similar words, "If the media would just go away, this would all fizzle out in a day or two. The only reason it is dragging on is because you're giving them publicity.''
I can recall when a female reporter for one of the networks was pushed down in the mud outside the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Pine Ridge. A national newspaper reporter was punched as he dictated a story from a phone booth in White Clay, Neb.
Along with a UPI reporter, I was detained for an hour or so by FBI agents at their roadblock on the Big Foot Trail, and I had a shotgun pointed at my face by one of the men occupying the village.
I don't know how reporters covering the riots and major conflicts in the country today feel about their status as neutrals or non-combatants. I never felt seriously in danger at Wounded Knee, although with all the guns around, it wasn't a great place to be. I always felt that as a reporter, I could move relatively freely between or among the sides, doing my job and being recognized as one who didn't have a partisan role in the conflict.
Like more reporters who shared my experience, I'm terribly saddened by the killings of working journalists on assignments in some trouble spots these days. War correspondents and others who work hot spots have always faced the possibility of being killed on the job, but if it happened, it most likely would have been because they were in a troubled area, not simply because they were reporters, or Americans.
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I never routinely feared for my life. These days, were I still on the job, I couldn't say that.
