A police officer shouts at Associated Press videojournalist Robert Bumsted, Tuesday, June 2, 2020, in New York. New York City police officers surrounded, shoved and yelled expletives at two Associated Press journalists covering protests Tuesday in the latest aggression against members of the media during a week of unrest around the country. Portions of the incident were captured on video by Bumsted, who was working with photographer Wong Maye-E to document the protests in lower Manhattan over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis (AP)
No rest for Journalists – Reporters faced with unlawful arrests in the midst of protests
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | JUNE 2nd 2020
After the breakout of riots all across America, following the death of George Floyd while in the custody of police, hundreds of arrests had been made and many police forces have resolved to use of violence against the protestors, as well as the journalists.
The string of arrests made against journalists was reported on Friday, and are all thought to have been kicked off with the unlawful arrest of a CNN news crew during a riot in Minneapolis. This alone violates the rights of journalists to cover major news events. “Journalists have a clear First Amendment right to cover public events,” said Parker Higgins, a Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy director, in a statement.
Another similar incident took place live on air when reporter Kaitlin Rust and her cameraman had been “courageously and lawfully” covering the riots in Louisville, Kentucky, for local TV station WAVE 3 News. While live on air, the pair were shot at by an officer with what appeared to have been pepper balls, as the footage shows. In a statement, the station said “There is simply no justification for the Louisville police to wantonly open fire, even with pepper balls, on any journalists under any circumstances.”
In an interview, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Barbara Davidson shared her own experience with the brutality of police officials during the protests. Davidson explained how she was covering the protests near the Grove shopping mall, in Los Angeles on Saturday, when a member of the police had ordered her to move on. After presenting him with her Press credentials, the officer expressed that he didn’t care, and repeated his demand that she move on despite her rights as a Press official.
After stating “Sir, I am a journalist covering this,” Davidson her turned around to walk away, only to find that she’d been shot in the back by the officer, causing her to fall and hit her head against a fire hydrant. Luckily, Davidson wasn’t hurt, as she’d taken precautions by wearing head protection gear. This doesn’t change the fact that her rights under the First Amendment were violated by the officer, and that had she not taken precautions, could have been facing a concussion.
“This story, in particular, it seems journalists are really being targeted by the police,” Davidson added. “That’s not something I have experienced before to this degree.”
The recent breakdown in the treatment of journalists at the hands of police officers in the past few days is not only wrongful, but also thought to be a direct result of collapse in relations between news media and the state. The situation is only exacerbated by the United States president Donald Trump and his past comments and insistence on “fake news,” even having gone so far as to regularly label certain individual journalists and news organizations with variations of the highly provocative expression: “enemies of the people.”
President Trump went on to blame the “Lamestream Media” for the protests on Sunday in a tweet, calling out journalists for being “truly bad people with a sick agenda.”
“I’ve really never seen anything like this,” said a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a co-director of its National Security Journalism Initiative, by the name of Ellen Shearer. “The president has called the news media ‘the enemy of the people.’ I think all of that has taken a toll.”
By Patryk Krych | © The World Daily 2020
Related: George Floyd’s death and the Minneapolis riots
