The Police Abuse the Press. Again. - Columbia Journalism Review
Trump’s rhetoric clearly doesn’t help. But there are much deeper issues at stake here—especially when it comes to police violence against reporters. Law enforcement have long targeted journalists covering protests. In 2014, for instance, at least eleven reporters were arrested while covering unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, while others faced threats and attacks; oftentimes, as The Intercept founder Jeremy Scahill noted yesterday, reporters at protests are “unfamous journalists from non-corporate outlets,” so their mistreatment goes unremarked upon. Too often, so does the routine abuse of protesters in America. Many of the journalists targeted this weekend reported that police attacked them even though they were prominently waving their press badges; that’s monstrous, but really, the badges are irrelevant. Wesley Lowery, who was himself arrested while covering Ferguson for the Washington Post, tweeted yesterday that the “ ‘escalating war on the freedom of the press!’ narrative” misses crucial context. “Journalists are not a specially protected class of First Amendment users,” he wrote. “It is no *more* outrageous for a reporter to be targeted with tear gas or rubber bullets or arrest than it is for a citizen peacefully assembling & chanting (no matter how angry) to be met with that same force.”
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