See South Florida? We knew underneath all that sun-soaked apathy and cosmetic work you had some dormant activist ire.
Last week, we clued you in on the protests breaking out around the country against the possible sale of the Tribune Co.'s fleet of top-quality news sources. Demonstrations were held in Orlando, as well in Los Angeles and Chicago to voice a collective "no" about Tea Party poster crew's intentions. Yesterday around noon activists crossed the Sun-Sentinel off the list. They mobilized outside the paper's downtown Fort Lauderdale HQ for some political theater.
"We don't believe the Sun-Sentinel needs a Koch problem, and here today we are here as the first step of our intervention," Eric Brakken, with 1Miami, the group running yesterday's show, told the crowed.
The group's Muhammed Malik tells New Times the demonstration pulled together a "small but raucous crowd" of about a dozen at the paper's Broward Blvd building. As you can see from the video below, they got things started by belting out a catchy hey-ho chant -- "We're gonna beat back, the Koch attack" -- before speakers addressed the assembly.
"We don't want one of our daily newspapers here in South Florida to become a megaphone to amplify the radical libertarian views of the Koch brothers and their radical agenda," Brakken said. "We deserve in South Florida to have independent, objective journalism that brings us the news."
He continued:
"The Sun-Sentinel being owned by the Kochs would promote a radical agenda that includes defunding education, privatizing social security, over-turning the new health care law, eliminating the minimum wage, attacking evidence of global warming and climate change, and destroying unions."
Malik tells New Times yesterday was the first in a handful of events aimed at pushing against the possible sale. We'll keep you posted.
Also, we're sure the Brothers K have been well-aware of this since they were scraping their penny-loafers on the playground, but it's pretty easy to cook up funny rhymes with their surname. Here's another one from yesterday: "If the Sun-Sentinel goes to Koch, our media will become a joke." Pretty easy, right? Now you try . . .
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