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

freedom.press

271–280 of 527 posts

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

#271
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.

It absolutely does NOT matter if someone is identified as press or not. If a protest is declared an unlawful assembly and people are ordered to disperse then journalists must obey the orders given by police too. They do not have special privileges that exempt them from following lawful orders by police.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the US, but here in Canada not following police orders is not by itself grounds for arrest. It has to be a lawful order, not whatever the police fancies at the moment. The police cannot for example say "stop filming or I will arrest you" and be able to legally justify that arrest in the court of law. https://globalnews.ca/news/6233399/supreme-court-montreal-es...

It's not, which is why you see people arrested this way getting released without charges. It's an intimidation tactic, and the officers face zero consequences for employing it. "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride" and all that.

Toronto police did very similar things during the 2010 G20 Toronto summit protests. Then chief of Toronto Police is now a cabinet minister. I don't want to insinuate that this kind of behaviour does not happen in Canada. It certainly does, but it doesn't make it right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX0BbLc_PIk

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you assume that cops are racist? Especially when a lot of them are black themselves?

Because we have looked at the statistics.

PNAS has also looked at the statistics:

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877

Police brutality is definitely a problem in the United States, but it appears to be entirely colorblind.

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

#274

This is because Black Lives Matter™, and because black lives matter. This isn’t a hyper escalation against freedom of the press, per se, it’s an escalation of police on citizen violence that came about when police felt threatened when folks got a little extra vocal about how the racist cops boys club has little to no accountability when harming citizens they’re supposed to protect. I think this narrowly focuses on tr…

>What the YoY stonks increase on Americans shot by rubber bullets? What is a YoY stonk

"YoY" is "year over year" in finance terms, it just some comparison of data from one year to data from the previous year.

"Stonks" is an intentional misspelling of "stocks" which is a meme word used humorously (like "pwn") and it implies that the speaker doesn't understand financial markets

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats. Many many many people have watched with their own eyes, live on video, what's been going on through the course of this year. We've seen CNN and ABC reporters shot with rubber bullets and accosted on l…

Journalist is not loosely defined. FTA: >While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work. Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time hig…

If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist. If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist. If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.

There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they probably shouldn't.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the person filming arrested for? I know many in Seattle were arrested for violating curfews or dispersal orders, and proceeded to claim that they were arrested for filming. They weren't arrested for filming, they were arrested because they harbored ill-conceived views that declaring oneself a journalist exempted them from curfews and orders to disperse and proceeded to violate them.

> Jimenez could be seen holding his CNN badge while reporting, identifying himself as a reporter, and telling the officers the crew would move wherever officers needed them to. An officer gripped his arm as Jimenez talked, then put him in handcuffs. > Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/…

> Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network.

Right, they were violating an order to disperse or a curfew. Again, being a journalist doesn't bestow some special rights that lets you ignore the police when they issue an order to disperse or set a curfew. When people are looting and burning stuff down, the law has provisions to let the police say "this is out of hand, the only way we have to restore peace is to tell everyone to get out of the area". And when people ignore those orders they're violating the law and subject to arrest. And so are CNN's journalists. Being a journalist doesn't bestow any special rights.

You can disagree with whether it was appropriate to order people disperse in this situation. But what is certain is that your previous comment was spreading falsehood: they weren't arrested for filming police, they were arrested for ignoring an order to disperse or a curfew. I'd come off as a lot less deceptive if you were transparent about the real reason for the arrest in your previous comment. It's 40 minutes old at the time of my writing this so you have at least an hour to edit it.

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

#277
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is such a strawman. I doubt you can find evidence of any of the arrested journalists actually getting convicted of a crime from their arrest, let alone a large percentage.

There's a difference between not getting prosecuted due to a lack of political will (i.e. in Seattle or Portland), and being innocent.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth. This is not what I see happening. Instead what happens is people see news they disagree with and deem it biased. So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.

So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?

I like AP and Reuters for my news internationally, almost everyone sources them. For more local, I try to find news aggregators, an example for Canada is nationalnewswatch.ca , takes articles from across the spectrum. This is really just for events though, when it comes to issues in tech, climate, etc that aren't necessarily an event, I tend to look to individuals in the field who don't go into politics for their analysis

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we have looked at the statistics.

Which statistics are these, please provide! They must be both very detailed and very massaged to get a result as generic as "cops are racist" (a mindset that requires significantly more information than provided by mere statistics to identify).

whenever this comes up, this is inevitably the response, which sometimes betrays confirmation bias. these statistics are not hard to find.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly technology workers, who tend to be largely liberal. Are you sure it's conservative?

I would guess it's actually that HN has members who aren't from the major tech metros, and people outside of those areas tend to be more conservative (in a relative sense at the very least). For many, this would be the main place they ever come across those people, which would make it seem unusually conservative.

As a theory, Y Combinator, thus HN, is strongly aligned with startups which, in less hip circles, are "small businesses". Small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them (eg. regulatory capture). It would certainly be nicer if more regulation created a level playing field and actually prevented anti-competitive practices.

To counter balance the above blatant and unfair stereotyping above, I'll add some devil's advocate too: "change the world" type leaders might also be more idealistic and would vote progressive anyway, even if it's not good business sense.

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