Weekly doesn't wait to publish warning to police

When a Tennessee Valley Authority police officer arrested a pesky anti-coal activist, who had posted a YouTube video of his mistreatment by a deputy sheriff earlier in the week, and the local sheriff transferred the activist to a jail in another county, Roane County News Editor Terri Likens thought it was time to warn the cops they were taking a "ham-fisted approach," and "Our community's reputation could pay the price."

Likens, right, didn't wait until her weekly print edition to take that stand. She placed the editorial on the paper's Web site, where news coverage usually goes, with this preface: "The following is opinion. We have posted it where we usually post news because we are disturbed by an escalating series of events recently involving the TVA ash spill and an activist working in the Swan Pond area."

Roane County is where the huge coal-ash spill took place in December. (The photo of her was taken during an overflight.) As the cleanup continues, activists and authorities have clashed. The arrested activist, with the United Mountain Defense Fund, was jailed after he didn't stop at a TVA checkpoint while taking a visually impaired woman home at night. The editorial said he "likely wanted to get arrested; he was wearing his gas mask, after all. ... Engaging with authorities is a common tactic with activists, and it can be effective if authorities bite. The danger is making the activist look like a martyr, and the folks who are restricting him look overbearing and even sinister." (Read more) Likens reports to us in an e-mail that after the editorial was published, TVA pulled back its barricades.