FROLITICKS

In June 2020, the arrest of a CNN news crew live on air in Minneapolis, where unarmed black man George Floyd died at the hands of police, first drew global attention to how law enforcement authorities in the city were treating reporters covering protests that had descended into riots.  At the same time, a reporter from Germany’s international news broadcaster Deutsche Welle was shot with projectiles by Minneapolis police while preparing to go live on air.  In September 2020, Los Angeles NPR station KPCC reporter Josie Huang was forced to the ground and arrested outside the hospital where two Sheriff deputies had been taken after having survived an ambush shooting.  Her press credentials were clearly visible in a recording of the incident.  At the time, the US Press Freedom Tracker, a non-profit project, said it was investigating in total more than 100 “press freedom violations” at similar protests. About 90 cases reportedly involved physical attacks. 

More recently, a small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the local newspaper, The Marion County Record.  A search warrant for the raid was issued by a judge roughly an hour before the search, which in itself was highly unusual.  As the New York Times reports, the advocacy director at Freedom of the Press Foundation, Seth Stern, noted that federal law allowed the police to search journalists when the authorities have probable cause to believe the journalists had committed a crime unrelated to their journalism.  That exception does not apply, however, in the above case where the alleged crime is simply gathering the news.  The Foundation is a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of journalists and whistle-blowers.  Mr. Stern also noted that, although news organizations are sometimes the targets of legal actions by government officials including subpoenas seeking interview notes and other records, the search and seizure of the tools to produce journalism are rare.  Normally, when journalists are suspected of committing crimes as part of news gathering, the government’s option is to serve a subpoena, which can be challenged in court before it is actually enforced.

For this reason, raids of news organizations are exceedingly rare in the U.S., with its long history of legal protections for journalists.  However, in recent years, particularly those under Donald Trump’s former administration, the mainstream media has come increasingly under attack for what Trump called “fake news”.  If he felt that the coverage was negative towards him, he immediately accused the reporting as being biased and inaccurate.  Often Trump refused to take questions from certain journalists known to report what he perceived to be negative news about his administration.  However, he never had any problem supporting right-wing media sources, such as Fox News, as presenting the truth, including his belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and illegitimate.  Conservative authorities appear to have been given the green light to increase their attacks on journalists and news outlets, especially in cases such as that in Marion County.

Whether at the local level or nationally, it is extremely dangerous that legitimate journalists can be attacked or threatened, physically or otherwise.  In addition, it’s becoming very difficult to keep newspapers in businesses and journalists employed.  According to a new report from Northwestern University’s journalism school in 2022, over 360 newspapers in the U.S. have gone out of business since just before the start of the pandemic.  The last thing that journalists need right now is to be threatened with legal action or physically while covering news stories.  What one particularly needs at this time is a strong mainstream media comprised of ethical and credible journalists willing to get the facts by following up and verifying their sources.  They should never be subject to intimidation for simply doing their jobs, which is the backbone of any democracy.

This most recent attack by local authorities on The Marion County Record is just the latest example of the inappropriate use of the judicial system to intimidate publishers and journalists.  It may only be a local incident, but it represents a much greater threat to the free press.  For this reason, it should be taken seriously as demonstrated by national support given to the publisher by more than 30 news organizations and press freedom advocates, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.