Timeline: One Year in the Debate Over Press Freedom

One year ago today I published a blog post entitled “Why I’m Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests.” The next day, police raided New York City’s Zuccotti Park, where they arrested 12 journalists and blocked many others from documenting the raid. Here is a look back at the year in journalist arrests and debates over press freedom in the digital age.

This is part of my new post: Why I Won’t Stop Tracking Journalist Arrests.

Sept. 17, 2011: Occupy Wall Street begins in New York City

Sept. 24, 2011: John Farley of WNET/Thirteen is the first journalist arrestedwhile covering Occupy Wall Street.

Oct. 1, 2011: The Occupy Wall Street movement crosses the Brooklyn Bridge, leading to mass arrests, including the arrests of three journalists.

Nov. 15–17, 2011: The New York Police Department raids Zuccotti Park right before the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Twelve journalists are arrested, with two more arrested on the actual anniversary two days later.

Nov. 18, 2011: The NYPD admits to arresting journalists with NYPD press credentials.

Nov. 21, 2011: New York media demand a meeting with NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne about abuses of press covering Occupy Wall Street.

Nov. 23, 2011: The NYPD issues a formal memo ordering officers to avoid “unreasonably interfer[ing]” with journalists. (Ten days later the NYPD arrestanother journalist.)

Dec. 1, 2011: Forty-thousand people send letters and call their mayors, asking them to defend press freedom in their cities.

Dec. 8, 2011: The Committee to Protect Journalists releases its 2011 global census of journalist imprisonment, and finds that “the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide shot up more than 20 percent to its highest level since the mid-1990s.”

Dec. 9, 2011: Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York calls on the Justice Department to investigate the NYPD’s raid on Zuccotti Park and its treatment of protesters and journalists.

Dec. 12, 2011: The NYPD arrests nine independent journalists, livestreamers and photographers at the Winter Garden in New York City. Video also revealsofficers blocking a New York Times photographer as he tries to cover the arrests.

Dec. 13, 2011: A series of “Who is a Journalist?” posts appear here, here andhere.

Jan. 3, 2012: The NYPD raid the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv, one of the central livestreaming groups covering Occupy Wall Street, and arrest six citizen journalists.

Jan. 18, 2012: The SOPA Internet Blackout spreads across the Web in protest of a piracy bill with broad First Amendment implications.

Jan. 25, 2012: Reporters Without Borders releases its yearly press freedom ranking. The U.S. plummets 27 spots to 47th in the world.

Jan. 28, 2012: Oakland police detain or arrest nine journalists when Occupy Oakland attempts to take over an empty building.

Feb. 2, 2012: Some cities respond to journalist arrests with apologies and police reprimands. Documentarian Josh Fox is arrested while trying to film a public hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Feb. 9, 2012: Sixteen-thousand people send letters of support to journalists who have been arrested.

March 3, 2012: Bay Area journalists and press organizations meet with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan about ongoing press suppression and arrests in the city.

April 30, 2012: A coalition of elected officials and members of the press file a civil rights lawsuit against the NPYD seeking redress for police misconduct during Occupy Wall Street protests. The National Press Photographers Association joins the lawsuit later in the year.

May 3, 2012: On World Press Freedom Day, a coalition of press freedom and digital rights groups send a joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling on the Justice Department to protect all people’s “right to record.”

May 14, 2012: The Justice Department releases a lengthy memo providing guidance to police departments and asserting that people’s right to record is protected under the First Amendment.

May 20, 2012: Four journalists are arrested while covering the NATO summit in Chicago. Other journalists and livestreamers complain about being targeted and harassed by police.

June 8, 2012: NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne tries to rewrite historyand denies the NYPD arrested journalists the department had earlier admitted to arresting.

July 25, 2012: Researchers at NYU and Fordham law schools release an eight-month study which finds the NYPD “consistently violated basic rights” by using aggressive force and obstructing press freedom.

July 31, 2012: Twitter bans journalist Guy Adams for revealing an NBC executive’s work email address during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. (Adams was later reinstated.)

Aug. 27–Sept. 6, 2012: The Democratic and Republican conventions included a significant police and security detail, but there are relatively few incidents of press suppression.

Sept. 15–17, 2012: Eight journalist arrests occur on the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. This leads to another set of letters from the Society for Professional Journalists, the National Press Photographers Association and 13 other media organizations.

Hint: US is way lower than most would assume, and for good reason. We need to stand up to the ongoing erosion of press freedom at home and abroad. 

nickturse:

Press freedom rankings from the Newseum and Freedom House

The most free?  Finland, Norway and Sweden.  The least?  North Korea.  Where does the U.S. rank?  Find out here at the Newseum’s website.

digitalnewsgathering:

“I had journalists who were poking fun at me, while I was in jail, on Twitter and social media” ~ journalist Susie Cagle

As the landscape of journalism changes, we need solidarity amongst journalists struggling against the slow grind of institutions that have not adapted to how journalism is done in a digital age. As more and more journalists on the front lines, covering our communities are from small newsrooms or independent, we have to rely on each other. See more on my thoughts about journalist support networks here. 

There was no reason to detain Ferral, other than police didn’t know what to do with her. In this country, that’s not a good enough reason to force a citizen to lie face down and be cuffed.

- John Drescher, editor, Raleigh News & Observer.

via Romenesko, “Town Apologizes for Arresting News & Observer Reporter”

(via practicalobscurity)

Me: So far very few cities have taken this important step. Of the 13 cities where journalists have been arrested over the past year only a handful have stepped up and apologized. Fewer have taken proactive steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Inside the BBC€'s Verification Hub

“The business of verifying and debunking content from the public relies far more on journalistic hunches than snazzy technology. While some call this new specialization in journalism “information forensics,” one does not need to be an IT expert or have special equipment to ask and answer the fundamental questions used to judge whether a scene is staged or not.”

I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen to freedom of speech as we enter into a networked world, but I suspect it’s going to spark many more ugly confrontations. Rather, it’s not the freedom of speech itself that will, but the visibility of the resultant expressions, good, bad, and ugly. For this reason, I think that we need to start having a serious conversation about what freedom of speech means in a networked world where jurisdictions blur, norms collide, and contexts collapse. This isn’t going to be worked out by enacting global laws nor is it going to be easily solved through technology. This is, above all else, a social issue that has scaled to new levels, creating serious socio-cultural governance questions. How do we understand the boundaries and freedoms of expression in a networked world?

danah boyd | apophenia » Free Speech, Context, and Visibility: Protesting Racist Ads

This is a must read.

Source: zephoria.org

New post on ground truthing and what journalists can learn from Apple’s map mishap. “If we are going to measure our impact in the world we have to get out in our world. We have to join community conversations, we have to be better listeners, and we have to ask different kind of questions. Our journalism shouldn’t be seen as something that happens to the community, but rather with the community. More than ever, as the ground beneath journalism shifts and our newsrooms adapt, we need to be testing our assumptions and ground truthing our data.” Read more here. 
Pop-upView Separately

New post on ground truthing and what journalists can learn from Apple’s map mishap.

“If we are going to measure our impact in the world we have to get out in our world. We have to join community conversations, we have to be better listeners, and we have to ask different kind of questions. Our journalism shouldn’t be seen as something that happens to the community, but rather with the community. More than ever, as the ground beneath journalism shifts and our newsrooms adapt, we need to be testing our assumptions and ground truthing our data.”

Read more here. 

“Journalists in Afghanistan work under extremely difficult circumstances and routinely face violence, threats, and intimidation that prevent them from carrying out their work. While many incidents go unreported, Internews partner Nai Supporting Afghanistan Open Media has collected hundreds of reports of such incidents. The map above represents ten years of data on violence against journalists in Afghanistan gathered by Nai’s MediaWatch team.” See more: http://data.nai.org.af/
Pop-upView Separately

“Journalists in Afghanistan work under extremely difficult circumstances and routinely face violence, threats, and intimidation that prevent them from carrying out their work. While many incidents go unreported, Internews partner Nai Supporting Afghanistan Open Media has collected hundreds of reports of such incidents. The map above represents ten years of data on violence against journalists in Afghanistan gathered by Nai’s MediaWatch team.”

See more: http://data.nai.org.af/

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