Attacks on Journalists Still a Concern; No Movement on Protective Legislation
Physical attacks on journalists aren’t now as common or in the news as they were in 2020, but there’s still more concern about journalist safety than just a few years ago, said broadcasters and journalism advocacy groups in interviews. Legislation from July intended to protect reporters from physical attacks -- the Journalist Protection Act (HR-4857) -- hasn’t had recent movement, according to trade group News Media Alliance. “I will be pushing the House Judiciary Committee, on which I sit, to consider and advance this bill,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., Thursday of the bill, of which he’s a sponsor. There's “a heightened sense of awareness” in newsrooms about reporter safety, said Kathy Reynolds, content director at Tegna’s WUSA Washington, D.C.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
NAB supports the Journalism Protection Act, it told us Friday, but the bill wasn’t named in the group’s list of legislative priorities released the same day. “We are gravely concerned about acts of violence, harassment and intimidation against broadcast journalists who play a vital role in keeping Americans informed,” said an NAB spokesperson. “By elevating intentional bodily harm to working journalists as a federal crime, the Journalist Protection Act sends a clear message that assaulting media workers engaged in newsgathering is unacceptable and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Swalwell (see 2101120061). Interest in journalist safety has “waned” without the intense headlines from 2020 and early 2021, said Committee to Protect Journalists U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen: “Hope springs eternal. I hope the lessons we learned in 2020 aren’t forgotten by the public and lawmakers.”
2021 didn’t have the widespread demonstrations of 2020, but still had more violence against reporters than the years before the spike, said Kirstin McCudden, managing editor of the U.S Press Freedom Tracker. The tracker recorded over 140 physical assaults of journalists in 2021, fewer than the 439 in 2020 but more than all such incidents from 2017 to 2019 combined, said McCudden in a blog post. Similarly, journalist equipment damaged in incidents in 2021 also outpaces the period from 2017 to 2019, and the number of reporters arrested or detained in 2021 is almost equal to that three-year period.
The incidents in 2021 look different because reporters are covering fewer huge protests, but journalists need to “remain diligent” about violent threats, McCudden said. It's “tempting” to conclude from the lower numbers in 2021 versus 2020 “that the state of press freedom in the US can be ignored,” wrote McCudden: “That conclusion would be wrong.”
Many of the protests reporters covered in 2021 and 2022 concerned COVID-19 restrictions and were smaller in scale, often with less action by police to disperse them, said Jacobsen. Reynolds said WUSA now sometimes hires security to protect reporters when they cover school board meetings: “Not all the time, but if we know there’s going to be a lot of people there, and heightened emotions.” Police seized the cellphone of a reporter from Williston Community Broadcasting’s KXWI(FM) Williston, covering a North Dakota school board meeting in January.
A wave of litigation from many of the incidents against reporters in 2020 is still shaking out, said McCudden. Tuesday, the Minnesota American Civil Liberties Union won an $825,000 settlement from the Minnesota State Patrol for journalists attacked by police covering protests in 2020, plus a federal injunction against police attacks on reporters, said an ACLU news release.
Reporter safety has long been a concern in newsrooms , but the rise in incidents in recent years has highlighted the issue, Reynolds and Jacobsen said. “There’s been a massive sea change in thinking about the risks,” Jacobsen said. Reynolds said her reporters regularly undergo training on covering risky situations, emphasizing avoiding being alone and having multiple plans for exiting an area. “If they’re not comfortable in a situation, we don’t want them in it,” Reynolds said.