Journalists are being targeted for doing their jobs in covering protests.
Bill Lueders for The Bulwark:
ON JUNE 9, PHOTOJOURNALIST MICHAEL NIGRO was shot in the head by Los Angeles police while covering a protest against U.S. immigration cruelty in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building. Fortunately for him, Nigro was wearing a helmet, which deflected the blow from what he believed to be a “less lethal” crowd-control munition. “It felt very very intentional,” Nigro told NPR, suggesting the goal was to create “a chilling effect to convince us to go away and not document” the protest taking place. He noted that both sides of his helmet had tags that said “PRESS”—his protective vest was even more prominently labeled—and he was carrying two professional-grade cameras.
What happened to Nigro is not an anomaly. Police in Los Angeles and elsewhere seem to be singling out members of the media for exclusion, arrest, detention, and the use of force. The Los Angeles Press Club and the investigative reporting site Status Coup filed a lawsuit on June 16 in the Central District of California alleging that officers at recent demonstrations have been targeting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs. In court, they presented thirty-five examples of police either barring reporters from public areas or using force on them such as Nigro experienced. “Being a journalist in Los Angeles is now a dangerous profession,” states the lawsuit, which named the city of Los Angeles and its chief of police as defendants. “LAPD unlawfully used force and the threat of force against Plaintiffs, their members and other journalists to intimidate them and interfere with their constitutional right to document public events as the press.” The complaint notes that the Los Angeles Police Department “has a long history . . . of using excessive force against journalists at protests,” citing violent police actions against the press during the Democratic National Convention in 2000. Similar accusations were made against the LAPD at various points over the following two decades, including during the 2020 protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In response to those latter reports, the California legislature enacted new laws in 2021 and 2022 to protect the rights of journalists covering protests in that state. The lawsuit called the department’s conduct during last month’s protests “a brazen refusal to abide by the Constitution and state law.”
What makes the matter more remarkable is that, on July 10, a federal district court agreed, essentially. Judge Hernán Vera of the Central District of California ordered the LAPD to stop obstructing, detaining, assaulting, and using “nonlethal” ammunition against journalists covering protests, as well as to stop limiting journalists’ movements unless circumstances make it absolutely necessary to do so. He imposed a two-week restraining order against the department, which may be extended after a preliminary injunction hearing set for July 24. [...]
MANY MORE SUCH INCIDENTS have been documented elsewhere. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, lists more than 50 assaults on the press that took place in June. Most happened in Los Angeles, where President Donald Trump sent hundreds of active-duty Marines and thousands of National Guard soldiers—many of whom hated and objected to their deployment—over the objections of the city’s mayor and state’s governor. Militarism may not necessarily cause police brutality and the targeting of journalists, but it surely does nothing to prevent it. What’s happening, evidently, is that a troubling number of law enforcement offices view press coverage of public protests as a threat, rather than a protected legal and constitutional right. Emboldened by Trump’s nonstop slander of the Fourth Estate, they feel justified in treating the press as enemies of the people. And again, all that stands in the way of their succeeding is the power of the courts, should anyone still be paying attention to that branch of government.
[...] What’s certain is that the protests will continue, and so will the attacks by police on the journalists whose job it is to cover them. That’s because a lawless president is an open invitation to law-breaking police.
Bill Lueders wrote in The Bulwark on how police departments are enlisting themselves into Donald Trump’s war on the press by endangering and suppressing press freedoms at coverage of protests.
