Press freedom is under attack during protests on campus

Violations of press freedom have risen sharply in recent weeks as a nationwide protest movement against the Israel-Gaza war has spread to university campuses.

The US Press Freedom Tracker has documented dozens of abuses related to pro-Palestinian protests and counter-demonstrations, and the number is likely to rise.

These recent incidents confirm what previous data in the tracker has shown: protests are a particularly dangerous place for journalists. Arrests and detentions of journalists, physical attacks on reporters by police and demonstrators, and police blocking of journalists’ access to protest events have emerged as worrying trends in recent campus protests.

Arrests or detentions must stop

Joseph Rushmore is one of the many journalists arrested by police for simply doing their job covering protests. Texas Department of Public Safety officers forcibly arrested Rushmore, a freelance photojournalist, as he photographed a protest at the University of Texas at Austin on April 24, 2024. Officers pushed Rushmore to the ground before using their shields to push him against the protesters, who had also been pushed along. Police charged Rushmore with trespassing, held him overnight and dropped the charges the next day.

Numerous reporters have been arrested or detained while covering protests against the Israel-Gaza war, including several recently on university campuses.

Some of the charges were quickly dropped. But the damage is still done: the arrest of journalists prevents them from reporting. For example, police arrested television journalist Adelmi Ruiz while she was covering student protests at California State Polytechnic University in Humboldt. Despite complying with police orders, Ruiz was handcuffed, removed from the protest and taken to the county jail. It wasn’t until hours later, when police dropped the charges, that Ruiz was able to return to campus and resume her reporting.

But the charges against other journalists were not dropped so quickly. Two reporters from The Dartmouth student newspaper, Charlotte Hampton and Alesandra Gonzales, were arrested for trespassing while covering a protest on campus on May 1, 2024. Public shaming by The Dartmouth and a coalition of press freedom organizations led by the Student Press Law Center may have inspired Dartmouth’s president to acknowledge that the student journalists should not have been arrested. But it took more than a week for prosecutors to drop charges that never should have been filed.

Other charges against journalists were not dropped at all. KTBC broadcast photographer Carlos Sanchez is charged with two misdemeanors after he was arrested while covering the same protest at which Rushmore was arrested. The Texas Department of Public Safety claims Sanchez intentionally hit officers with his camera, although videos from various camera angles show nothing of the sort.

The case against Sanchez is so flimsy that the department can’t even decide what to charge him with. Journalism and press freedom organizations led by the Society of Professional Journalists have condemned these latest allegations against Sanchez, but police and prosecutors don’t seem to be listening.

If officials continue to file criminal charges against journalists who are simply doing their job to cover protests, it sends a chilling message to other reporters: Stay away or we will prosecute you too.

Police must stop arresting journalists covering protests. If she accidentally arrests a reporter, she should immediately release him and allow him to continue collecting news.

Physical assault is a crime

In one of the most shocking incidents the tracker has documented to date, counter-protesters attacked four student journalists from the Daily Bruin at UCLA in the early morning hours of May 1, 2024: Catherine Hamilton, Shaanth Kodialam, Christopher Buchanan, and a fourth unnamed Bruin reporter surrounded by counter-protesters and punched, punched, kicked or sprayed with chemical irritants. Hamilton was briefly hospitalized after the attack.

That same night, Dolores Quintana, co-editor of the weekly newspaper Santa Monica Mirror, was attacked by counter-protesters. Quintana told the tracker that she was hit on the back, grabbed, her phone intentionally knocked out of her hand and finally sprayed with a chemical irritant from just a few inches away.

Physical attacks against journalists are a crime. They also undermine the press’s ability to report the news.

When protesters or counter-protesters target the press, it becomes harder to get the news out to the public – which is exactly what some may want. As Quintana wrotethe counter-protesters at UCLA “deliberately” targeted the press “so that no one would be there to take photos and videos of the crimes they were committing.” Physical attacks also deter others from covering protests Fear of harming them too.

If police weren’t so busy arresting journalists, perhaps they could prioritize investigating attacks on them instead. In a free society, crimes against the press should never be tolerated. Those responsible for the attacks on the press at UCLA and elsewhere must be held accountable.

Blocking access to control the narrative

Police have blocked journalists or locked them in areas where they cannot observe protests or police activity, often as a tactic to prevent the press from observing the actions they take against protesters.

For example, the tracker has documented incident after incident at Columbia University in which journalists were chased off campus and herded around, locked in campus buildings and threatened with arrest, or prevented from leaving buildings on the night the New York police cleared Hamilton Hall, which had been occupied by protesters earlier that day.

Apparently the NYPD didn’t want journalists – or the public – to witness the violent evacuation of Hamilton Hall, where the Columbia Spectator reported that police pushed protesters to the ground, bashed them with metal barricades and threw at least one protester down the steps. It later emerged that an NYPD officer had fired his weapon.

Instead, the NYPD wanted the public to see their official police version of events. A day after the raid, the department released a propaganda video that portrayed the protesters as violent, stinking agitators and the police as heroes. According to Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb, at one point police actually denied the press access to Hamilton Hall because they were filming their sizzle film.

From Colombia to California, the demand for journalists to stay away from the action is an apparent attempt by police to control their coverage of the protests and the police response. Consigning journalists to specific reporting areas prevents them from following events and speaking to sources.

These are just some of the incidents the tracker has documented in recent days. There are increasing reports of journalists being arrested, attacked by demonstrators or counter-demonstrators, attacked with chemical irritants, or having their access to protests restricted.

These ongoing press freedom violations are a national embarrassment. Police and protesters know that interfering with the press is unacceptable. Police departments across the country paid millions to settle lawsuits that followed similar abuses during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

But they also seem to believe – often rightly so – that they can get away with it. Unless prosecutors or the public hold police and others who violate press freedom accountable, journalists covering protests will remain under threat.