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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

“It has a ripple effect,” Mr. Maldonado, of Article 19, said. “It goes beyond just the discourse, which in itself has an inhibiting impact on the press.”

Add this to the record breaking number of journalists arrested in the US this year [0], and it's plain to see that truth is at a premium. People on this site like to proselytize about freedom of speech, well this brazen attack on freedom of speech, where people are being held against their will or murdered, should weigh most heavily on our minds.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25432540

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The report compares the number of arrests in 2020 -- a year that saw the largest number of huge protests in decades-- to the number of arrests in 2019--which contained nothing approaching the number, scale, or sheer chaos of the George Floyd protests.

This might indicate that journalists are under attack. But it seems more likely that some tiny percentage of journalists at a given protest are arrested at any given protests, and that in years with more protesting, more journalists will be arrested. Crank up the number of events, and you crank up the number of arrests.

In fact, their posted numbers track quite closely with this wiki data on size of protests in a given year [0][1].

2020 - 20,000,000 protesters - 181 arrests 2019 - No protests indicated - 9 arrests 2018 - 3,500,000 protesters - 11 arrests 2017 - 6,600,000 protesters - 38 arrests

The increase in 2020 is out of proportion with the other years, but then the marches in 2017 & 2018 were generic, peaceful protests, while the George Floyd protests where chaotic (as evidenced by the resulting 2 Billion in property damage)[2]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United... [1] [2]https://fee.org/articles/george-floyd-riots-caused-record-se...

I think a more precise observation is that when law enforcement is more heavily scrutinized, they crack down harder. This isn't police "confusing" journalists and protesters like you are implying.

Example:

Federal Judge Restricts Portland Police Interactions With Journalists, Observers (July)

https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-judge-portland-poli...

Portland journalist arrested while clearly displaying his credentials (August)

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-journalist-a...

For what I have seen, people on this site has for the last decade been rather skeptical about freedom of speech. When a journalist is being arrested the common top threads are about the validity of the evidence and if the person is guilty or not, and with a large portion of people saying that the individual should face the charges if they are innocent. I have also seen plenty of high upvoted comments that explicitly say how people who play the game in regard to politics should not be surprised if they get burned. I have been in those flame wars advocating for freedom of speech, but it usually doesn't end that well.

The only thing I would expect is a universal opposition to journalists being killed.

> with a large portion of people saying that the individual should face the charges if they are innocent

Can you link to such comments?

What makes you so sure that these people were arrested for telling the truth? What about telling the truth would be an offense worthy of arrest in the US? Assange and Manning come to mind, for leaking government secrets.

But according to the article, most arrests happened in connection with Black Lives Matter protests.

It seems equally plausible that more people than ever try to evade arrest by claiming they are journalists. Or journalist have less and less ethics when doing their jobs.

Not saying that's the root cause, just that you can not simply assume all those people were arrested for telling "the truth".

And how do people who bemoan that stand on the subject of censorship on social networks?

> What makes you so sure that these people were arrested for telling the truth?

> But according to the article, most arrests happened in connection with Black Lives Matter protests.

Kinda answered your own question here. Journalists were arrested for being present at newsworthy events, recording the truth as it unfolded before them

Most probably weren't even arrested. Just "detained" while detaining the group of protestors they were amongst.

The link included in the person you responded to says: "About half the journalists here are freelancers, who may lack the institutional support of a newsroom and the financial resources for a potentially expensive legal defense."

Journalist isn't a protected title. And I wonder how many activists don the "Journalist" label at protests.

I have heard it is a common strategy among activists now, but that was a claim made by their "opponents", so not sure how prevalent it is.

If you go read the source for the numbers, journalists "detained" in a group of protestors being detained were included in the count. You can easily rack up large numbers that way. The journalists caught up in these were allowed to leave after they had the group under controlled.

But according to the article, most arrests happened in connection with Black Lives Matter protests. It seems equally plausible that more people than ever try to evade arrest by claiming they are journalists.

Not really. The first amendment protects freedom of the press as well as freedom of assembly. Arresting protestors has a similar chilling effect on speech.

Pretty sure that only applies to peaceful protests.

Almost every day during the height of the protests there were videos circulating of the police arresting people (and using violence against) people who were obviously journalists.

For example, a CNN reporter was arrested mid-broadcast and there was footage of some people with cameras being attacked even though they were sat at the side of the road filming rather than taking part.

"Equally plausible" is false equivalency.

>People on this site like to proselytize about freedom of speech

Perhaps you've been away for a few months? Stopping the spread of "fake news" is all the rage now.

The numbers are inflated by including "detained" journalists and by using a loose definition of journalist. The "detained journalists" include journalists caught in a group of protestors being "kettled" and were later released once the group of people were safely under control. It wasn't like the cops were targeting all the "detained journalists". It also seemed they included anyone calling themselves a journalist. I couldn't even find any sort of presence of some of them.

Wasn’t there a thing where the police arrested press on national tv, with badges and everything? Didn’t a photographer for the news have their eye shot out by police?

Who can trust any claims that they aren’t targeting journalists to arrest given this?

Yes there was "a thing where the police arrested press on national tv". That does nothing to change the fact the "Freedom of the Press Foundation" inflates their "arrest" numbers by including journalists being caught up in "kettles" for a short time and released once they got around to checking for press. It is all in their data. They don't even try to hide it and do not see it as disingenuous to include them as arrested or detained.

Several journalists violated dispersal orders and curfews, and were subsequently arrested and their arrests were recorded. But the police were also arresting non-journalists violating the curfews. There's zero indication that police were targeting journalists. In fact, the opposite many journalists were released hours after being arrested.

Contrary to what seems to be common belief, being a journalists does not confer any special rights or exemptions

There is in fact indication that journalists have at least been targeted in Portland according to an ACLU case, which results in a judge putting a restraining order on the police. I’m not a law person, so if you know better on the nuances please educate me on the matter but this legal judgement implies to me that journalists do have some special status and that it is is inappropriate to target them for arrests.

It's a violation of civil liberties for the police to unjustly target anyone. If the police for some reason didn't like a certain hairdresser and targeted him or her, then the same protections would kick in.

Josie Huang in LA (KPCC, NPR) was tackled and arrested while screaming "I'm a journalist" and wearing her press badge, yeah. It wasn't on national TV, it was captured by someone else (the "amateur" press that people think shouldn't be covered) with a phone.

See: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/josie-...

For context, more than 3,000 were arrested in LA county during the period of unrest last summer: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/george-floyd...

Pointing to individual instances of reporters being arrested obscures the broader picture: level of unrest unprecedented in decades promoted curfews which many disregarded and were subsequently arrested. A slim minority of those were journalists.

To put this in perspective, 117 people categorize as journalists (the majority were self employed) were arrested in 2020 as per an earlier HN post [1]. Contrast this to 3,000 total arrests in LA county alone. And that figure for LA is from early June. As I pointed out, journalist arrests are disproportionately concentrated in areas that saw widespread rioting [2].

The idea that police in the US are targeting journalists is unsubstantiated. Journalists are putting themselves in positions in which any normal person would be arrested, and the police are treating them like any normal person.

1. https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434409

> Journalists are putting themselves in positions in which any normal person would be arrested, and the police are treating them like any normal person.

Which is exactly why we expect journalists to have special protection, and thus why we track violations of these norms. And things are clearly getting worse.

The point isn't to find an excuse for the police here, it's to recognize that a problem exists and find a solution.

> Which is exactly why we expect journalists to have special protection

I don't. Freedom of the press is the freedom of anyone who has one to publish, not special freedom of media or journalists as a privileged class.

In fact, I find the suggestion of such “special protection” to be aristocratic and not merely outside of but contrary to the idea of press freedom.

I am concerned about activity designed to prevent people from engaging in journalistic activity or retaliating for them so doing, I am not concerned about journalists being subjected to the same treatment as everyone else unless that treatment would be unacceptable if they weren't journalists (and, in that case, the objection has little to do them being journalists, though if the wrongs are concentrated on journalists, it starts to look like deterrence or retaliation against journalistic activity.)

> Which is exactly why we expect journalists to have special protection, and thus why we track violations of these norms. And things are clearly getting worse.

No, we don't. Journalists aren't some elevated caste that are privileged above normal people. And besides, most of the journalists arrested were not employed by a news organization. Anyone can call themselves a journalist.

The "problem" seems to be that journalists are treated like normal people. The thing is, many do not see a problem with this.

> Journalists aren't some elevated caste that are privileged above normal people

That's simply not true, and the whole premise behind the linked article makes that clear.

And the weird thing is that you'd clearly agree, IF the journalists were covering something you wanted covered. The only reason I see that you're fighting like crazy over this is that the US journalists in question were covering a protest movement you opposed.

At this point I'm really not sure how you're coming to these conclusions. I support protests and lawful demonstrations. People and journalists aren't being arrested for that. This was stated in the comment I linked, so I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that I oppose these protests.

What I do oppose are people violating curfews or orders to disperse and falsely claiming that they were arrested for journalistic activity while omitting the fact that non-journalists in the same area were also arrested.

> People and journalists aren't being arrested for that.

I literally linked an event upthread where a journalist was arrested for exactly that. I suspect the reason you really aren't sure what I'm saying is that you aren't reading what I write.

It looks like Huang was not the only person accosted by the police in this incident. Again, all these incidences of journalists being "targeted" have a familiar theme: a journalist is embedded within a mob, and the actions of the mob lead police to arrest the mob (including the journalist). From your article:

> Huang was filming a handful of men who had gathered outside the hospital making anti-police statements.

> Huang said she followed deputies who were chasing one of the demonstrators after the small group dispersed. She began recording the protester's arrest when the deputies shouted at her to “back up," she said.

> Sheriff Alex Villanueva refused to apologize for Huang's arrest and accused her of "crossing the line from journalism to activism" by coming too close to the scene of the protester's arrest.

> "In the heat of the moment, when these protesters are calling or chanting for the death of the deputies in the emergency room, she picked the worst time possible to try to get an up-close of the deputies making an arrest," Villanueva said during a news conference on Monday. "And that's on her."

That statement is belied by the video of the incident, though. Go watch it. She's surrounded by about 8 cops and no one else is present.

Note that Villanueva's original statement about this incident (that she had no credentials and did not identify herself) was a straight lie, again given clear video evidence. So I don't understanding why you're deferring to him here. Again: watch the video. It is ABUNDANTLY clear that the police knew she was a journalist and that they knew she wasn't part of the protest, and that they were punishing her for trying to record their actions. It really is.

Is it really so hard to admit that, yes, cops do bad things sometimes, that we should track that via objective metrics like the linked article, and that this year they've done more of them?

I watched the video. The police were arresting her before Huang shouted that she's a journalist. How is this supposed to be evidence of the police targeting journalists?

The video is less than a minute long. Both the police's account and the Buzzfeed article claim that Huang was with a group of people making "anti-police" statements (according to the police's account, these included death threats) outside of a hospital treating a pair of officers who were shot in an ambush. What happened between that and Huang's arrest is not captured on video.

Yes, police do bad thing sometimes. But targeting journalists isn't one of them. This incident is not an example of that. There is no indication that Huang wouldn't have been arrested if she wasn't a journalist.

It seems like the only thing that would appease you is if the police immediately ceased arrests when people claim to be a journalist. This is not feasible, because anybody can claim to be a journalist and the police have no immediate way of validating these claims. What they can do is proceed with the arrest and release the person if their claims of being a journalists are discovered to be true. Which is exactly what happened here: Huang was released and charges against her dropped.

Not arrested. It was arrested or detained. Detainment included being amongst a crowd being "kettled" and later released from the "kettle" once they could deal with it.

> The numbers are inflated by including "detained" journalists and by using a loose definition of journalist.

It's rather the opposite. Arguments like yours are intended to deliberately question numbers that have always been computed like this. Not all journalists are formally credentialed, in fact most of the best footage of the summer protests was captured by amateur press with their phones.

The lines aren't ambiguous: if you call yourself a journalist, don't take part in a protest, and make a reasonable attempt to label yourself as press, then you are press.

And that's a good thing for all of us. Note that lots of the footage of vandalism that made the rounds in right wing circles was also captured by amateurs (c.f. Andy Ngo, who while a very polarizing figure did a lot of highly consumed press work with nothing but a phone and a twitter account).

If they cannot be truthful as to detainment of journalists, how can I trust they are not padding journalists as well? I would expect their criteria to exclude the "don't take part in a protest" considering being caught up in a "kettle" is "detainment" even though journalists were released because they identified as journalists.

The right to a free press is universal, all that is required to be a journalist is to cover events to other people.

If you are participating in said events, you are no longer a journalist. The blatant dishonesty of calling detainments arrests and including getting caught up in a "kettle" because they were in the crowd as detainment leads me to believe they would also include participants calling themselves journalists in the list. Why should "journalists" participating in the event receive any special treatment? It should be expected they be treated as any other participant.

>It should be expected they be treated as any other participant.

There's another way to reach this goal without arresting journalists.

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