Georgia Fort Warns Rachel Maddow of Escalating Misinformation War: ‘Journalism Is Not a Crime’ | Video
Independent Minneapolis journalist Georgia Fort appeared Monday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to discuss her arrest by federal authorities last week and warn that the indictments against her and fellow journalist Don Lemon have taken the “misinformation war” to “another level.”
Both Fort and Lemon were arrested by federal authorities Friday for covering an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota that saw protesters take over a local church in the middle of its service. The two journalists have been accused of violating those churchgoers’ Constitutionally protected religious worship rights. Fort live-streamed her arrest and told Maddow that the targeting of her by the Department of Justice just marks another example of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between the Trump administration and the press.
“I think in the last few years we’ve seen an exodus of not just Black journalists but journalists in general from mainstream media. There’s been a series of things that have happened, right?” Fort said. She went on to reference the reshaping of the Pentagon Press Corps by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension last year and the delayed release under new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of a “60 Minutes” segment about the detention of Venezuelan men deported from the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador.
“There’s been a strategic attack on the free press for quite some time, but recently it is intensifying and I would say that the arrest of myself and Don Lemon is a new level,” Fort told Maddow. “To try and criminalize journalism? Journalism is not a crime and, for me, when I think about the attack that we’re currently seeing on the press, I really want the American people to understand [that] attacking the press is not simply just attacking journalists. It’s attacking the public’s right to know.”
“So often there are things that have happened with government agencies, people in power, big institutions [where] they sometimes may cover up their misdeeds,” she explained. “It is the act of journalists and journalism that oftentimes reveals those truths. So, if we are going to attack this pillar of our democracy, I’m concerned that the misinformation war that we’ve been experiencing is going to escalate to another level.”
Unfortunately, Fort told Maddow she does not believe the Trump administration’s attacks on the press will end with her and Lemon’s arrests. “We saw AI images being published by the White House that [misrepresented] the reaction of one of the [Minneapolis] protesters being arrested,” she noted. “The only way that we knew it was fake was because someone was there to document what really happened.”
“I do believe that this is an information war,” the independent journalist continued. “The people who are standing up for truth, the people who are not afraid to document what’s happening, I think that we’re going to continue to be attacked.” Elsewhere in her interview, Fort spoke briefly about the “traumatic” effects that her arrest, which involved nearly two dozen federal agents arriving at her door, have had on her and her children, the latter of whom have been “afraid to be alone” in the days since.
“We’re trying to recover from this,” Fort said. She went on to express her gratitude for the support she has received not only from her legal team but also from members of the Minneapolis community. “Folks have been going to my website and making contributions there, but not just to the legal fund. Folks are wanting to support my ability to continue telling [these] stories,” she shared. “This is something, I think, that definitely would probably silence a lot of journalists, and I’m committed to continuing to tell the story.”
Maddow, for her part, emphasized the importance of meeting Lemon and Fort’s arrests head-on. “That attack for democracy defending itself has to be met with not just an equal-sized and equally aggressive defense of journalism and journalists,” the MS NOW anchor explained, “but one that is a defense effort that, I think, is larger than the attack that engendered it in the first place.”
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