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Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

freedom.press

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Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#31

Post by indigochill »

chrisseaton wrote: post #10
NDizzle wrote: post #7

What's their definition of journalist here? Journalists, at these protests, that were arrested? In other words, how many twitter followers do I need before I can identify as a journalist?!

I wonder if there's any countries that specifically recognise people as journalists? Like how police officers have a warrant and specific powers and accountability, could legitimate journalists be recognised, empowered and held accountable like that? Then it could also be an offence to impersonate them. Otherwise yeah a journalist is just some random person claiming to be a journalist and I'm not sure what could be d…

Among the professional journalists I've known (quite a few since I went to journalism school and worked in a newsroom for four years), licensing has been universally seen as a Bad Idea. The reason being that this gives the licensing authority power to decide who deserves to be recognized as a credible journalist, which is one very small step away from power over deciding right/wrong-think, which is antithetical to the point of journalism.

Perhaps a compromise is to identify a journalist by the news network they're associated with.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#33

Post by ultrarunner »

rhacker wrote: post #9

In some protests, when things get violent, is it easy to spot a journalist or do they just look like other protestors? honest question.

As far as journalists are concerned, they feel they were specifically targeted because they were journalists. A search [1] pulls up several examples of these claims. Some of the photos make it pretty hard to give police the benefit of the doubt (as far as whether journalists and protesters are hard to tell apart).

Even still, what we have is a situation where people were attacked and permanently injured by police. For example, Linda Tirado was permanently blinded in her left eye from police shooting a less lethal foam bullet. A photo of the officer aiming at her [2] leaves little doubt that he intended to shoot her.

In my mind, that leaves two possibilities: journalists were regularly physically attacking police officers, or police officers— unprovoked— attacked and maimed journalists covering the situation. Neither of these should be true in any capacity.

This is, of course, to step over the other oft-repeated claims by protesters that police were responsible for most of the violence. Given that the protests were largely due to police violence, this doesn't paint the situation in a better light.

[1] Setting region to US may return better results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=protest+police+targeted+journalist... [2] https://www.startribune.com/photographer-sues-says-officers-...

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#34

Post by Miner49er »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #27

Honest question: why were these journalists arrested? Do you actually have to commit a crime or can you be arrested as part of crowd control technique and released later? Did these journalists actually commit a crime? Will they be charged with something in court?

The police were attempting to intimidate and silence them is the honest answer.

I'm not sure if any were charged with anything that stuck, because likely none of them committed any actual crimes. It's just police abusing their power.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#35

Post by tppiotrowski »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #27

Honest question: why were these journalists arrested? Do you actually have to commit a crime or can you be arrested as part of crowd control technique and released later? Did these journalists actually commit a crime? Will they be charged with something in court?

- Disturbing the peace

- Resisting/obstructing an officer

- Failure to disperse

- violating curfew (journalists are exempted here)

According to the report most charges are being thrown out. Do reporters have immunity to the first 3 violations in that list during a protest?

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#36

Post by umvi »

ausbah wrote: post #29
umvi wrote: post #2

> The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter. So basically, it's not a coincidence - police are more likely to arrest journalists that are attending anti-police protests. And it's sort of understandable. Imagine you are a police officer called to go to a protest where ever…

police don't nor should get to brutalize civilians just because they don't like being called out for the corruption and abuse of power rampant in their profession

I'm not saying it's right, just that it's understandable. To use a software analogy it would be like if for your job you were forced to help make a website for anti-software developers who hate you and your profession, and you are treated poorly while trying to do your job. That environment is not going to cultivate craftsmanship to say the least. The right thing to do is to dutifully and professionally execute your tasks, but in reality people have emotions and some software engineers in that position might sabotage the project out of spite.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#37

Post by NDizzle »

Miner49er wrote: post #28
NDizzle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was arrested while livestreaming to Facebook I would be on their list of arrested journalists. Technically this means that a journalist was arrested in this situation, by their definition above: https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/us/chicago-facebook-live-beat...

So? It's still an attack on the 1st amendment. During the protests I was watching an aggregation of different livestreams on Twitch, many of them were streams on Facebook. Some of the journalists doing reporting on there likely only had a handful of viewers when they started getting streamed by the aggregator and then they had thousands of viewers. These types of journalists caught many of the instances of police bru…

What I'm hearing is that if I live stream myself performing a crime, and I'm arrested, I'm now a valid statistic for a journalist being arrested.

Is that accurate? I strongly disagree with you, if so.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#38

Post by ultrarunner »

umvi wrote: post #26
ausbah wrote: post #23

a free, professional, and trustworthy press is vital for any functioning democracy. through all the rightful and wrongful critiques people have given the press over the past 5 years, I wish more people would understand this I unfortunately think that the US is trending towards the likes of countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia and how they handle their press

> I unfortunately think that the US is trending towards the likes of countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia and how they handle their press We just had 4 years of every major media outlet (besides Fox) raking the president of the country over the coals 24/7... I think we still have a long way to go before we are like Turkey or Russia (how often do you see criticism of Putin or Erdogan in their respective media?).

I could be wrong, but the wrinkle I see is that their raking him over the coals is perceived to be in pursuit of their own political goals, not in pursuit of the truth. Their criticisms were trivial (as an extreme example, Melania's performance redesigning the rose garden). Arguably, stories of substance such as police violence were actively suppressed by the state through intimidation.

I largely agree, but this isn't a mono-dimensional topic. The press could remain free in trivial matters while becoming more controlled in matters relevant to governmental accountability.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#39

Post by zug_zug »

umvi wrote: post #36
ausbah wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

police don't nor should get to brutalize civilians just because they don't like being called out for the corruption and abuse of power rampant in their profession

I'm not saying it's right, just that it's understandable. To use a software analogy it would be like if for your job you were forced to help make a website for anti-software developers who hate you and your profession, and you are treated poorly while trying to do your job. That environment is not going to cultivate craftsmanship to say the least. The right thing to do is to dutifully and professionally execute your…

Well "understandable" sounds dangerously close to acceptable. Because it's foreseeable departments need to be extra judicious in which officers they send into emotionally charged situations, officers lacking self-control are going to do the country more harm than good in protest situations.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#40

Post by postalrat »

umvi wrote: post #2

> The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter. So basically, it's not a coincidence - police are more likely to arrest journalists that are attending anti-police protests. And it's sort of understandable. Imagine you are a police officer called to go to a protest where ever…

Maybe I'm wrong but it seemed like anyone could go in there with a camera and "journalist" written onto their shirt and behave like they don't need to follow orders from the police.
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