When we at the Committee to Protect Journalists set up our Emergency Response Team last year, we thought we would be helping journalists working in conflict zones such as Myanmar and Syria. Twelve months later, that has proved to be the case with one addition: the United States.
The land of the First Amendment is obviously not Syria. However, during the past year, journalists working in the U.S. and foreign journalists visiting the U.S. have had to learn how to better protect themselves, whether in the field or online.
Overzealous policing of the media at demonstrations, assaults on reporters by protesters, or vicious personal attacks on journalists online by ideologically warped trolls did not begin a year ago. However the verbal onslaughts on the press — first by candidate and later President Trump — have not only coarsened the public discourse about the role of the media and undermined the importance of truth-seeking, but also heightened journalists’ fears about their own security.
Anticipating a period of difficulty for global media freedom under a Trump administration, CPJ helped rally domestic and international press freedom groups last year to defend basic values. For the first time in the U.S., CPJ established a team to track attacks on journalists as well as other violations of press freedom. One year into the Trump presidency, the results of that monitoring are in, and they are not pretty.
In 2017, 44 journalists in the U.S. were assaulted, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that we launched with the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Since this is the first monitoring mechanism of its kind, there are no comparable figures from earlier years.
Some of the attacks were by law enforcement officers and two were by politicians, including a Montana congressman. But the majority of the attackers were members of the public — ranging from white nationalists to anti-fascists. Seventy percent of the attacks took place at rallies and protests.
Most of the 34 arrests of journalists during 2017 were similarly at public protests. The largest number, 10, was during demonstrations against the acquittal of Caucasian former policeman Jason Stockley in the shooting death of an African American man, Anthony Lamar Smith, in St. Louis, Missouri. At the protest, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Mike Faulk was corralled into a confined space between protesters and police. He was then pinned to the ground and pepper-sprayed. Faulk was arrested and charged with failure to disperse.
In addition to assaults and arrests, journalists were subjected to equipment searches or seizures 15 times, and five journalists were stopped at the U.S. border in 2017. And while being questioned by a customs agent may not sound unusual, in three of the five recorded stops, border agents demanded to see journalists’ phones, computers, and social media accounts. In January, BBC World Service reporter Ali Hamdani was detained for more than two hours at Chicago O’Hare airport as agents searched his phone and computer and read his Twitter feed. The detention of the British-Iranian journalist came two days after Trump signed an executive order banning entry to the U.S. for 90 days for individuals from seven countries, including Iran.
Hamdani’s detention seems to be indicative of a broader trend. U.S. Customs and Border Protection this month reported a 60 percent rise in inspections of electronic devices to a record 30,200 in the year to September 2017. Such searches are particularly chilling for foreign journalists entering the U.S. and American reporters returning from overseas assignments who may have sensitive information and the names of news sources that need to be kept confidential.
Amazingly, this has amounted to four safety advisories (out of a total of 13 issued by CPJ’s emergencies team since the 2016 election) designed and issued for reporters working in or traveling to the U.S. One such advisory covered safety advice for journalists reporting on protests. For reference, in 2017, the other countries where CPJ issued protest advice for journalists were Belarus, Kenya, and Venezuela.
Though it’s impossible to say that Trump’s dismissal of reporting he dislikes as "fake news" or his attempts to undermine portions of the media has physically harmed a journalist, the constant drumbeat of denigration from a head of state raises concerns at home and abroad. In 2017, the number of journalists in jail for their work globally was a record at 262. Of those jailed, 21 were held on charges of spreading “false news.”
The leaders of countries that routinely throw journalists behind bars are also no doubt avid consumers of Trump’s Twitter feed and find his rhetoric against the media gives them useful cover (he’s posted more than 1,000 tweets about the press since he launched his presidential campaign).
The U.S. press has weathered White House onslaughts before. Long before Trump instituted his stark rhetoric, President Barack Obama was criticized by many in the Washington press corps for tightly controlling media access and prosecuting unprecedented numbers of leakers who fed information to journalists. Amid all that the U.S. was still largely perceived as an upholder of basic media freedoms at home and abroad, and its institutions could be counted on to protect journalists.
They still can be. But for how long if the daily barrage from the White House continues?
Robert Mahoney is deputy executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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