According to the New York Times, at least six journalists were charged with rioting after they were detained while covering some of the more “violent protests”* taking place near Trump’s inauguration parade.
The journalists were among 230 people detained in the anti-Trump demonstrations, during which protesters smashed the glass of commercial buildings and lit a limousine on fire.
The charges against the journalists — Evan Engel, Alexander Rubinstein, Jack Keller, Matthew Hopard, Shay Horse and Aaron Cantu — have been denounced by organizations dedicated to press freedom. All of those arrested have denied participating in the violence.
“These felony charges are bizarre and essentially unheard of when it comes to journalists here in America who were simply doing their job,” said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of Pen America. “They weren’t even in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were in the right place.”
The journalists in question are being arrested for being around the violent parts of the protests—a guilt by proximity.
The National Lawyers’ Guild accused Washington DC’s metropolitan police department of having “indiscriminately targeted people for arrest en masse based on location alone” and said they unlawfully used teargas and other weapons.
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Reports on the arrests of five of the six journalists contain identical language alleging that “numerous crimes were occurring in police presence”. They state that windows were broken, fires were lit and vehicles were damaged. “The crowd was observed enticing a riot by organizing, promoting, encouraging and participating in acts of violence in furtherance of the riot,” the police reports said.
You can watch the violence in the protest here. Note that in these protest clips there are a handful of of people doing violent things at certain points and then everybody else is just protesting the way you would imagine normal Americans would. The very end of the clip shows a view of the big bashing of a Bank of America set of windows and a Starbucks—all on the same street, at the bottom of the same building. If you look closely you can see people covering this, with cameras and the like. Those people are under no legal obligation to step in the way of idiots with rocks and pipes to stop them from beating up buildings. You want to use their footage to help identify “rioters,” that’s one thing. You want to make it illegal to show what’s happening in the streets, that’s fascism.
*I note that with the exception of a handful of masked individuals attacking property, the general tenor of the protests, while understandably angry and frustrated at times, has not been riotous or violent. If you collect thousands of people together to march and five of them decide to be violent it doesn’t mean the protest itself was a violent one. Allowing traditional media outlets to paint those protests as “violent” is problematic for a variety of reasons as it makes it very easy to discredit what the overwhelming majority of people are saying.