Steve Baker, who captured dramatic video on Jan. 6, is charged with four federal misdemeanors. Just who qualifies as a journalist on Jan. 6—and who decides?
Politics and journalism have had a nagging way of becoming intertwined during Steve Baker’s 45 years of adult life.
As an idealistic twenty-something in the early 1980s, he wanted to run for mayor of his hometown—Shreveport, Louisiana—a place with a storied history of political and judicial corruption.
Mr. Baker thought he could help clean up the “terribly corrupt, almost mafioso-run government,” as he put it. So he sought advice from Kevin Doyle, the city hall reporter for The Times, Shreveport’s daily newspaper.
“No, no, no, no,” Mr. Doyle told him emphatically. “You do not want to do that.”
“Why not?” Mr. Baker asked.
“They will eat you alive,” came the reply.
Mr. Doyle’s admonition made an impression. “He actually talked me out of it,” Mr. Baker said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
Some 42 years later, Mr. Baker finds himself at the center of a swirling storm, buffeted by the blustery winds of Washington politics and an often-partisan debate on just who was a journalist on Jan. 6.
On March 1, Mr. Baker surrendered to the FBI in Dallas on a warrant charging him with four misdemeanor crimes for his presence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
A cell phone video of Mr. Baker in handcuffs being led from the FBI’s guard shack to a waiting car went viral, racking up millions of views that day and 14.6 million views over two weeks.
As he was swept up in the Department of Justice’s historic dragnet, Mr. Baker became at least the ninth independent or “citizen journalist” to face charges over Jan. 6.
Mr. Baker, 63, of Raleigh, North Carolina, said his arrest was really not about his work as an independent journalist on Jan. 6, or a set of alleged trespass-related crimes brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
His “sins,” he believes, were a series of articles that portrayed U.S. Capitol Police and the DOJ in a negative light, along with Mr. Baker’s sharp and pointed commentary about Jan. 6-related corruption.
“After not having indicted me for three years, it is clear that any move to do so now will be in retaliation for my reporting,” Mr. Baker wrote in January.
“I will not be intimidated. I will continue to report the findings of my investigation into the evidence being made available to me to review.”
