Journalists need more protection in digital age

Public protests may be vital to the health of democracy, but like many other things that have health benefits, they can also be messy, unpredictable and risky. That has always been true for protesters and has grown especially true since the George Floyd murder in 2020, which inspired demonstrations often directed at the same police that marchers face in the streets. But in recent years it has become dangerously true for the news media as well, with evidence mounting of instances where reporters and camera people are the hapless targets of police fury for doing nothing more than bearing witness when citizens raise their voices.

It's not hard to understand why police, who rarely welcome coverage unless it's given a heroic Hollywood flourish, might be more thin-skinned than ever. Incidental violence that in pre-digital times would have gone unnoticed can now reach viral audiences in the millions, with ruinous consequences for careers, public image, and police appropriations.

But the news media have a job to do; it's a constitutionally protected job that keeps us fully informed about significant political and social realities, including when people take to the streets in lawful protest. The duty of the police is to enforce the law, which means not to suppress, but to enable, that protest and to protect the media's efforts to tell the public about it.

It is not the duty of police to shoot a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter with pepper balls, or a public radio reporter in Santa Monica and a Los Angeles radio journalist with rubber bullets, to shove a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist into a fire hydrant, or to ignore press IDs and take reporters in Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles into custody. Those are among the incidents recounted in a letter earlier this year from the California News Publishers Association and five other media advocacy groups — among them the First Amendment Coalition, where I'm a board member. The letter condemned a “blatant disregard for the safety of journalists” and urged support for a bill, now pending, whose lead author is state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg.

McGuire's bill, SB98, would prohibit police from keeping the press out of areas closed off as a way to control protesters and would forbid police to charge reporters who are doing their jobs with breaking curfew, failing to disperse or violating similar police orders. The bill also would make it illegal to “intentionally assault, interfere with, or obstruct” reporters who are gathering or processing information for the news.

It's astounding that such obviously improper conduct should even need new legislation to outlaw.

The bill is a strong and necessary corrective, but it errs by confining its coverage to “duly authorized representatives” of news organizations. That feels like a throwback. At a time when news information comes from a vast range of points, the bill narrows its safeguards needlessly. The iPhone user who gets the pictures of a demonstrator being clubbed should be protected, too, especially since the footage is a few clicks away from airing on CNN.

Some far-sighted police officials recognize this democratization of news flows. In the aftermath of rioting in 2020 after the Dodgers won the World Series, Dominic Choi, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, issued a memo reminding his officers: “The inability to produce identification does not preclude an individual from acting as a member of the media.”

Indeed, deciding who's a “duly authorized” journalist is beside the point; what's vital is to protect the reporting, not the reporter. That means safeguarding all efforts to witness and describe events to inform a larger public, regardless of the credentials of the people making those efforts.

That's not a quibble, it's a recognition of profound changes in our news environment, which we would do well to support. McGuire's bill, which now needs Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature, is a valuable step toward a strengthened defense of news gathering.