Constitutional Press protections perish

Citing police actions against journalists, Germany, Australia and Turkey have called for respect for press freedom in the United States. While the Turkish governmental protests are a bit opportunistic, given their own record of arresting CNN and domestic journalists, it is fair to say that the detainment of the German and Australian reporters by American police would be unheard of in their own countries, and used to be unthinkable here. As would have been the detainments of American journalists while covering the George Floyd protests by cops not so very long ago.

Some cops have always been a bit too vigorous with the media, yet the general constitutional role of the press has usually been respected by cops at a crime scene. No longer.

In the era of “fake news” and a hostile political environment, such tolerance has waned. Since protests began on May 26, journalists covering the demonstrations, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an advocacy group documenting the problem, have reported more than 250 abridgments of press freedoms across the United States.

Pauline Adès-Mével, a spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders, told The New York Times that the frequency and the intensity of the U.S. attacks are “shocking…It’s a democracy, and it’s also a symbol,” she said of the United States, adding that America stands “no longer a champion of press freedom, either at home or abroad.”

African-American journalists have often been the first to be arrested. ABC News’ Tom Roussey noted how the police near the White House slammed a riot shield into his cameraman’s chest. The authorities in Minneapolis fired projectiles at a CNN crew, led by the correspondent Omar Jimenez, and arrested them live on the air. In the moments before the 5 a.m. arrest, Mr. Jimenez could be heard calmly identifying himself as a reporter and offering to move to wherever he and his team were directed. “Put us back where you want us, we are getting out of your way, just let us know,” Mr. Jimenez told the police officers, who were outfitted in riot gear, as the network broadcast the exchange in real-time. “Wherever you’d want us, we will go.”

They spent an hour in custody. Every hour a reporter is locked in jail, in violation of the First Amendment’s defense of “Freedom of the Press,” is an hour that a critical element of the tale of the protests – and the police brutality from which they were spawned – goes untold. Harassing reporters is a way of erasing history from the history books. It serves as a means of keeping silent oppression.

This worldwide phenomena silences newspapers in Hong Kong critical of the advance of the Communist Chinese in the once free city-state. It covers the ethnic cleansing of Kurds by the Turks. It protects corruption in Hungary, Russia and countless other aspiring dictatorships. But no one ever thought it could happen in America.

Response from the White House? Silence. Trump held up a Bible in front of St. John’s Church, but the Chief Law Enforcement official in America could not deign to loft a newspaper or praise a Black journalist’s bravery – as D.C. police forces arrest reporters mere feet away from his office door.

Shakespeare once said that the first thing that an aspiring dictator should do is “kill all the lawyers.” However, the bard was wrong. The first thing a smart autocrat dictates is “arrest all the journalists.”

This article originally published in the June 8, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.