Saturday is the 4th annual Grassroots Media Conference, a huge, day-long event organized by the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition. The New School University will host the event from 10am-7, and the conference will include speakers, workshops, film screenings and art exhibitions. This year’s theme is “Media Movements Beyond Borders”; the wide-ranging topics will have the common goal of creating social justice through better access to and representation in the media.

Look for workshops “The New York City Streets Renaissance: Reclaiming New York City’s streets from the automobile”; “DIY Animation Crash Course”; and “Grassroots Media and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Development.” Films include “50 Shots and a Mule,” a documentary on the protests that followed the Sean Bell shooting, and the state of protests in general, and “Land, Rain, and Fire: Report from Oaxaca.”

From the organization’s website:

Grassroots struggles for justice are usually rooted in their geographic locations. Yet—from police brutality on the streets of Queens to government repression in the plazas of Oaxaca; from homelessness and displacement in the Bronx to the rise of slums in Lagos; from hunger and poverty in East New York to famine in Kenya; from wiretapping and police surveillance in our communities and military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan—there are apparent connections in the ways people all over the world negotiate and counter similar forms of oppression and injustice.

NYC Grassroots Media Conference
“Media and Movements Beyond Borders”
Saturday February 24th, 2007
New School University
65 Fifth Avenue (at 13th Street)

Yesterday, The Queens Gazette wrote up the reopening of a hardware store destroyed by a fire on Father’s Day 2001. Three fire fighters were killed and others seriously injured by the fire when gasoline was ignited by a basement pilot light and blew out the store’s facade. It’s undoubtedly a tragic story, but some of the reporting is questionable at best.

It began when two boys, then 13 and 15 years old, sneaked into the store’s back yard on the afternoon of June 17, 2001. After they had tired of other amusements, they decided to try “burning” graffiti-writing whatever they chose to scrawl in gasoline on a given surface and then setting the “writing” on fire so the image burned into the surface. In the melee, a can of gasoline tipped over and spilled. The gasoline flowed through the crack at the bottom of a door giving access to the store basement. The gasoline had partly evaporated and the vapors ignited in the flame of the pilot light of a gas hot water heater.

Does “burning graffiti” into “a given surface” sound too vague and heavy handed. It should. It’s entirely made up. While there is consensus that the boys were looking for spray paint to do graffiti, the only mention of the boys doing anything with gasoline besides accidentally knocking it over, is unsurprisingly, a 2005 editorial in the Queens Gazette.

The fire started when two teenage boys who were burning graffiti into the store’s rear wall accidentally tipped over a gasoline can.

For future reference, it is very suspicious when these silly facts are not reported in the NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, or official investigation report for that matter. We’re not accusing the Queens Gazette of fabricating evidence. Wait, yes, we are. Please don’t try to play us like that.