Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year | Hacker News Reader

Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

freedom.press

503 pointsinfodocket493 comments

One line from the report jumped out at me as I was skimming it:

> About half the journalists here are freelancers, who may lack the institutional support of a newsroom and the financial resources for a potentially expensive legal defense.

I hadn't really thought of the value of legal defense from journalism institutions (as opposed to non-institutional platforms like Substack) before.

We will look back on the ruination of journalism as a profession as one of the most consequential changes of these last two decades.

I mean, it's a double-edged sword.

On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth.

On the other side, now that everyone is a reporter, people roll around inside whichever cocoon of bias makes them feel the best.

It's very frustrating, and overwhelming.

> On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth.

This is not what I see happening. Instead what happens is people see news they disagree with and deem it biased. So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.

So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?

Well, there are some standard ways, just like when you do research:

1. Check out a bunch of their articles on various topics, the more controversial the better. That way you can kind of gauge which way they lean.

2. Find some other source, preferably several, check out their biases they same way.

3. Then compare some articles about the same thing, from all these sources.

Look for stuff like references, sources, lack of weasel words or outrage inducing phrasing, aggrandizing vocabulary, etc. The more boring an article sounds, the more likely it is that the reporting is solid.

Yes, it's a lot of work, but you don't have to do it for every article, you do it maybe once every few years, to re-evaluate the options.

I think this philosophical discussion is important, but just want to take a moment to point out that it often buries a pretty obvious lede and gives an out for aggressive bias.

For example, last night every major news site had a headline about Biden's electoral college victory, or about Biden's speech, or about the virus. Fox News's huge banner headline was that Joe Biden had "a bit of a cold". This to me indicates an extreme bias.

This is not to say other MSM sources aren't rife with bias--for example, all are staunchly pro-corporate, as they are owned by corporations. But bias does come in degrees; we must continually try to be aware of biases in our media, but we shouldn't treat all MSM as "equally biased and equally bad".

I don't know how to answer your dilemma that all of us face. But to add some nuance... it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods. An individual reporter may stretch the truth more than we're comfortable with, but as a whole, the big news outlets are more likely to make mistakes than commit outright lies that they know are false.

Most of the bias is in deciding what stories to cover and what stories to ignore. They can't simply cover everything that happens. An organization needs to decide what stories are worthy of publishing, and how to frame these stories ("All the news that's fit to print"). And then which politicians do they want to ask questions of, and what types of questions, and that's even before deciding what experts, or "experts" or pundits or downright paid shills to comment on these stories. This is where the bias is.

> it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods

Have you been not consuming news for the last 5 years?

Can you point to cases where this is common in mainstream news outlets? We are talking about exceptions, not norms. The 1619 Project and its revisionist perspective may have had misleading conclusions (or premises) but it was not committing errors of outright falsehood. This just an example of bias vs factual misinformation.

What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation?

The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?

It would be morally questionable, but it should definitely be their right to do exactly such a thing if that's their particular bias. It would be factual too, though with an extremely biased construction, which should itself also be their right.

To give a much more politically correct example of the very same thing, the media harps enormously on most cases of whites committing violence against black individuals. To do so is generally basically factual but the degree to which it is done without giving context can create an enormous slant to a more contextually nuanced situation.

> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness

You evaluate multiple sources to independently verify information, and you hold each source up to consistently good ethical behavior and accurate information.

Basically, treat journalism like science, but a little more fast and loose (literally) because you can't wait for 10 years of research to determine how to act politically or economically.

Do something similar to journalists:

1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1.

2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources.

3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened.

4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.

This is helpful, and something I agree with mostly. Of course the difficulty is what you nodded towards in point 4: "Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down". We lead busy lives and need to digest news quickly. It helps when you have a few voices from different domains that you trust, where you can let your guard (relatively) down.

The other thing that is helpful is your reminder to cross reference sources with no vested interest. The conspiracy-mongering journalist has a vested interest in his/her narrative looking convincing and will have a link to his merch site at the bottom of the article/vodcast/podcast.

I like AP and Reuters for my news internationally, almost everyone sources them. For more local, I try to find news aggregators, an example for Canada is nationalnewswatch.ca , takes articles from across the spectrum. This is really just for events though, when it comes to issues in tech, climate, etc that aren't necessarily an event, I tend to look to individuals in the field who don't go into politics for their analysis

> As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible,

There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial.

For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there.

> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?

Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble.

Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE.

I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance.

But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.

Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy".

Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there.

I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they cover that's even the slightest culture war adjacent with a fistful of salt.

> I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility

Political alignment is a valid criterion to curate your news feed. However, if you apply that as your only criterion, you end up back at square on: getting a colored sliver of the news.

There are many more criteria you could apply as well. Is it a non-profit or a for profit outlet? Is the outlet based in the U.S. or is it located abroad, say, the E.U. or Asia? Is it a local, regional or national outlet? Is it an outlet I consider as my primary, daily go-to, or is it an outlet I consider as a weekend read? Is it an outlet focussing on a particular demographic? Which one? Am I part of that demographic? Does the outlet only provide short-form news articles, and/or long-reads with background information? Does the outlet report from a single side, or does it pit different perspectives against each other in equal measure?

Asking those questions to yourself adds differentiation in your how you curate your news intake.

The latter doesn't even have to be limited to other news outlets. Reading books is one of the best ways to gain the perspective one needs to digest the daily news.

I follow U.S. news sources but that doesn't mean I'm willing to accept what they publish at face value. Amending the news with many other sources helps me to gain perspective.

The trouble today is how much attention is diverted towards consuming fast digital media and being active in a 24/7 economy. If you don't take the time to stop, slow down and think about what the news is reporting, you're not going to develop the skills and the knowledge to properly digest the news and form nuanced opinions.

> Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy".

NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet.

The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom issues that don’t get airtime in other outlets, it’s not just “all left all the time”. Maybe give it a listen sometime and see what a true counterpart on the other side would sound like - it’s always enlightening to hear what other people hear. And bear in mind - that's what it sounds like for me to listen to Fox, too.

That’s a big part of the problem with the right-wing media bubble at the moment, you think the counterpart to Fox News is NYT but that’s a false equivalency. NYT is ultimately a middle of the road outlet, you’re just so far out of the mainstream that it looks left. I frequently consider NYT articles to be taking too much of a pro-right or pro-corporate stance on an issue (especially Maggie Haberman, she’s just awful).

At the end of the day the US has two right wing parties - one center-right and one far-right, and that's how our news media is structured too. We have two pro-corporate parties, and that's how our news media is structured too. MSNBC is owned by General Electric, with major interests in defense contracting. Washington Post is owned by Bezos. Fox is essentially a media arm of the Republican party. CNN are just sort of chaos monkeys chasing share prices. There is very little "independent media" in the US.

And no, I don’t take Democracy Now too seriously either.

If all you see is the right wing in the US, I don't think it's me who needs recalibration.

You think it's shocking that the country where the #1 cause of bankruptcy is an (often trivial) interaction with the free-market medical system, with the world's highest per-capita prison population, is right wing?

Ok then.

If you don't think the US is a right-wing country, you do need recalibration lol. And that's really both parties for the most part - the voice for, say, medicare for all, or for abolishing penal slavery, are basically nonexistent and non-mainstream.

In international terms, the US effectively has a far-right party and a centrist party, with a handful of leftists lumped into the centrist party where they're effectively sidelined in terms of policy.

The same country with ridiculous public spending on medical care under the disguise of a free market medical system? Literally 1.2 trillion dollars of federal spending on healthcare in 2019.

The same system that centrally plans and limits care provider production. You don't have market health care or socialised heath care. You have a solution that somehow combines the worst of both.

Then you look at the global dosage of other countries. Its the US socially right of China? Japan? Any part of Asia? If your calibration is literally the left half of the spectrum I guess you'd see the US as the farthest right of the world.

Others have given great responses, but one thing not emphasized enough is recognizing the type of language used. It failed for various reasons, but The Knife used to do a textual analysis of articles and point out the manipulative language used. A quick example off the top of my head is recent reporting on the US election (all paraphrased, but I bet you can find real examples easily):

"... baseless claims" "... without evidence" "... debunked conspiracy theory"

These may be factual in some (or all) cases, but it is manipulative language. It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory. There's much to be discussed about dis- and misinformation, but overall the truth emerges only in sunlight.

Also watch those adjectives. They love their superfluous adjectives.

This. This. This.

I'll throw in a few other ideas:

1. 'Opinion' panels should come from both sides of the political isle. Thoughtful panelists should be able to get to the bottom of ideas (instead of getting caught up in partisan minutiae). If they can't have a good discussion they shouldn't be on the panel.

2. Recommendation algorithms _must_ attempt to diversify a user's taste rather than silo them. This is an ethical issue and may hurt the bottom line.

3. Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. It is patronizing to have it any other way.

4. Context is key - sound bytes and cheap twitter drama are destroying journalistic integrity. Journalism is archaeology of the now. It should be treated with the rigor of a science. Have some respect for yourselves and we will do the same!

> Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions.

I don't even mind someone spelling out the conclusion for me, as long as the article contains links to original sources so that I can verify it. But even that is rare. Most links in an article point to other articles written by the same newspaper.

As an example, suppose a newspaper writes an article about something related to Wikipedia. I would expect to see the word "Wikipedia" hyperlinked in the article many times, but none of those links would actually lead to Wikipedia; they would lead to random other articles of the same newspaper that happen to mention Wikipedia. It would be probably impossible to get to Wikipedia from the news article by merely following hyperlinks.

Except those aren't example of manipulative language as they're factual descriptions of the claims. If I say the sky is made of honey without any evidence to back my claim and you report on my statement describing it as having no evidence, you've done nothing wrong. Your description of my statement is not using superfluous adjectives.

Anyone making a claim of fact needs to be prepared to back it up. Far too many people game the media by making absurd claims knowing their claims will simply be reported verbatim. Accurately reporting a claim is presented without evidence or is repeating a previously debunked statement is a necessary counter against people making absurd factual claims.

There's a clear dividing line between making statement claiming fact and a statement of opinion. If I tell you I think the sky is made of honey I may be factually incorrect but I'm not claiming to be making a factual statement.

Claims of fact deserve much more scrutiny than opinions. You're entitled to any opinion you want but you are not entitled to your own facts. When your claims of facts pose a material danger to persons or simply the rule of law, especially when they come from people with a wide audience or power, they deserve even more scrutiny than some Joe Shmoe.

The real world doesn’t work like that and facts and opinions are almost always a mixed bucket. What you consider evidence or fact is not what someone else does. Implicitly there is a possibility any claim is wrong with a normal title, but some titles and articles bias the user. If you titled an article “Giantrobot claims those aren’t examples of manipulative language” that’s fine but if the same article was titled “Without evidence, giantrobot claims those aren’t examples of manipulative language” then that is bias. Because your level of what constitutes fact, opinion, and evidence is different from everyone else’s. Another example: What is evidence someone was in a specific room at a specific time? Someone seeing someone come out of it? Seeing someone with an item that came from the room? Someone else saw someone come out? Or do you yourself need to physically see it? There are just so many levels. In your example of the sky made of honey, don’t you think without evidence isn’t needed at all to let someone understand the facts. Isn’t allowing the claim to speak for itself do the same job.

First, bias happens. A journalist should aim to be objective but they are not saints of objectivity. Second, it's not unreasonable to editorialize a little bit when discussing statements that appear to a reasonable person to be made in bad faith or are self serving. If I routinely made claims of fact about the honey-like nature of the heavens despite frequent demonstrations of my claims' absurdity and falseness, it would not at all be unreasonable or "biased" to point out a priori that I still had not produced any evidence of my claims. It's certainly not unreasonable if I run late night TV commercials asking for money from pensioners to launch a mission to collect sky honey.

As for evidence of an event occurring, you'll also notice journalists go out of their way to second source statements of facts. They want first-hand accounts from named sources in order to put an identity and reputation up for scrutiny. Ideally they also want a second named source but failing that they will often accept unnamed sources (to whom the journalist knows the identity but does not publicly reveal it). This is a common practice specifically because journalists are rarely in the room when and where events occur.

The problem is, if they just repeat the claim verbatim, and it's about a complex topic (such as election interference or vote rigging), how is the reader supposed to actually make a decision on the topic, without doing weeks of investigation on their own? Shouldn't it be the media's job to analyze the claims and then inform the reader if they're valid or not?

Aren't you then arguing that is explicitly the media's job to manufacture consent among the public, according to the interests of their shareholders? If so, I would agree that that is frequently the role of a journalist.

No, that is not what I am arguing. I'm saying that part of reporting claims by public figures is also providing the context of the claims made, so that the reader can make decisions with more information than just the claim (since the claim itself usually does not have enough information to make a decision).

Also, just an FYI, your comment didn't feel like it was written in good faith when I first read it. I had to actively suppress my bad faith detector to write my reply. Just feedback for future comments.

I just wanted to chime in and say how unbelievably refreshing it is to see someone acknowledge this out loud. It seems like people typically ingest "news media" without much critical thought and repeat news headlines with total ignorance of the subjective or manipulative slant that the news outlet applies to the material. I imagine a lot of the manipulative wording is not even intentional, either, but I'm not sure that makes this any better. :\

For clarification, how do you say Trump has claimed without evidence the election was rigged, without it being manipulative? This is precisely what Trump did and has done for the last three election. He has made claims without evidence, baseless and any “evidence” that backs it up is debunked.

This is actually exactly what I’m talking about, these news agencies are reporting accurately the events. And you don’t like it.

"Without evidence" is state of fact, that is not manipulative. Also, if something was debunked multiple times already and is in fact conspiracy theory, it is perfectly appropriate to call it "debunked conspiracy theory".

What calling these manipulative and refusing these as statements does is that it biases writing towards claims without evidence and towards conspiracy theories. Because you dont allow writer to call them what they are.

> It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory.

Note that many without evidence behind them and conspiracy theories have claims that in isolation sounds ok. It is only when you check evidence and find that there is none you know to reject that.

The question I get me from your dilemma: it is worth the time evaluating a source for trustworthiness ?

I see it as a proxy for actual cross checking every time, but more and more, cross-checking is needed anyway. Some sources could be permanently rejected, but ‘trustworthy’ sources consistently miss important information that only come in corrections with a significant delay. If we’re not taking the info at face value, the “trust” part is not there anyway.

And if we’re talking about well thought and researched pieces, I’d argue we should also take the time to think about them and do our own sanity checks.

I found this book a good education in critical thinking skills when consuming news sources:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245

Video link and summary of some of the books points can be found at:

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-...

All you had to do was read their entire post

What I see happening is people experiencing news being delivered in a way that uses obviously biased language and phrasing and, not impressed with being taken for an idiot, they go elsewhere. There they will probably find the same sort of bias and then conclude that MSM is generally useless.

> So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.

Watching the phrase "fake news" become coopted to mean "news unfavorable about Trump" instead of literally "false information" was one of the more depressing aspects of the 2016 election.

I don't think it's that. People have always seen things they disagreed with in the news. The bias now is undeniably real. For example, the NYT has lost its credibility with me by firing its editor for running an opinion that I disagree with.

I don't think this "balance" framing really works.

Absolutely, traditional journalism had some problems with bias, and they were tough to improve.

I can't think of a single thing in journalism (NB, journalism, not information access) that hasn't become notably worse due to the collapse.

Sometimes it helps knowing a source is biased. Reading National Review, for example, allows you to assume the opinions held are relatively conservative. Reading the Bulwark, you know there is a progressive bent. Proceed with your own thoughtfulness therefore in comparing the two. We as consumers/readers never read an article without bias either.

Sure, but that hasn't changed in recent years.

What seems to have changed, to me at least, is that journalists have shed whatever veil of balance and impartiality they used to wear and have gone full fledged activist, even on the job. As such, their image is no longer of the semi-neutral third party, but just the foot soldier of the enemy's side of the culture war. Once you're there, there's no room for balance, or "tempering bias"; concession to the "enemy" is now disloyalty to your side.

It's the most consequential change in the past 244 years, as a free press is the cornerstone of democracy. The death of journalism is the opening of the door to autocracy.

Yellow journalism has always been a thing and has been problematic lots of times in our history.

This is really just the prolonged conclusion of 24 hour news cycles that have been with us since cable television.

What's the quote about newspapers bringing all of the horrors of the world to your doorstep? Television brought them into your living room. Now with online media you carry them around with you.

Now with online media you carry it into the bathroom.

(Low quality comment, I know. I'll see myself out.)

Actually, that's a really good continuation of the analogy. Doorstep > living room > bathroom is a pretty succinct continuum of personal privacy or intimacy in your your living area.

Chilling, honestly. The way news is presented and consumed now means it's all horrors that we can't escape from.

It's all intensely personal and polarizing.

We almost certainly won’t. If anything is ruining journalism, it’s themselves, not this.

If you've ever taken a course on American history, you'll recall that in the late 19th century some American newspapers started a bullshit war with Spain. The journalism industry has never been clean. Even Benjamin Franklin was using newspapers as a vehicle for overt propaganda. He created the first foreign language newspaper in America to propagandize to Germans in Pennsylvania. Journalism and propaganda have always been close siblings.

There are organizations filling this gap. I can think of several that probably need a donation this year:

   https://aclu.org
   https://freedom.press
   https://eff.org

How many 'journals' actually resort to legal action (or even threats thereof) against law enforcement organizations? I would guess the press usually use negative coverage as a sort of retaliation when they feel wronged.

I have nothing against either lawsuits or journalistic retaliation, but I think the latter may be ineffective in this polarized environment, when websites and papers have taken hard stances.

Isn't it common knowledge that Gawker was a media company that irreverently covered silicon valley until it was bankrupted through litigation? The law courts are the main way that journalism is attacked in non-autocratic countries. Strong freedom of the press laws are celebrated, because they are constantly under siege by powerful people, who once targeted, would rather not have them.

Gawker is a bad example... Nick Denton was known for being happy to gossip and libel; he always said his victims loved the attention, and that if they hated it so much, they could always sue him. Eventually, some did.

The very name of the publication says everything I ever needed to know about them. Gawk: to stare or gape stupidly. Their articles invariably lived up to the name. This was not an organization anybody should have been taking seriously.

Gawker was bankrupted because they really wanted to display Hulk Hogan's penis, filmed on a hidden camera in a private room, on their website.

edit: removed reference to violating a court order, even though they did before having it overturned.

That's entirely incorrect.

Gawker objected to that court order, and won (https://www.leagle.com/decision/inflco20140117151).

> The circuit court's order granting Mr. Bollea's motion for temporary injunction is reversed because it acts as an unconstitutional prior restraint under the First Amendment.

There's clear Supreme Court precedent from cases like New York Times Co. v. United States (the Pentagon Papers case) that prior restraint is unconstitutional.

They lost the overall case on other grounds.

If gawker is your example of journalism here, then i I'm perfectly fine with seeing it burn.

I was also thinking it could be a contributing factor on the causal side too. I hate how this works, but it happens in many other parts of life too - if you look official, like wearing a uniform or having professional equipment, then you are treated better or given the benefit of the doubt.

What do you mean by "non-institutional platforms"

It goes further than that. Risk transfer is increasingly happening. For example take security. Freelancers don't have proper backup the way a big org does but are becoming more and more at risk.

Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?

The sudden outpour of the wisdom of ~30 day old accounts.

tech people aren't immune to the hyper divisiveness taking place around the world. Once "your team" decides it no longer wants to respect freedom of the press or election results then you must follow suit. Gotta make sure your team wins, right?

Some people don’t play on a team.

That's another team.

> Some people don’t play on a team.

That's not a team!

I'll work with anyone (within reason) to build a better tomorrow.

"We're all individuals!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ

"I'm not."

Then you're probably following a losing strategy. "Team" doesn't have to mean "generic normie political party"; there are other team dynamics at play. In any case, if you haven't partitioned the political space into allies and enemies along at least a few planes, you're probably going to get taken advantage of (at the very least).

I am fine with being an individual with original opinions but I can empathize with insecure people who band together for reassurance.

If you're not attuned enough to figure out why political alliances are worthwhile, your opinions probably aren't that original.

It's not a matter of "reassurance" - it's about economies of scale. If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw", this is very strong evidence that you don't actually have a good grasp of people's motivations.

Strength in numbers is a compensation for insecurity.

> If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw"

Conformity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity

Why do you think people who are undoubtedly smarter and more original than you are also buy into political "teams"? If "conformity" is your best answer, then once again, this demonstrates you don't really grasp what's going on.

Read the Wikipedia link. It answers your question.

This is not meant as an insult to you, but just as a warning that you should keep this in mind when you’re analyzing your own decision making; you are pretty clearly neither smart nor original. It’s very unlikely you are actually ever going to have any valuable original thoughts, at least in the way you seem to think you do.

I’m sure you’ll appreciate this since your profile is all about “radical honestly”. Taking Dalio seriously is another sign of a hopeless midwit with an inflated sense of intelligence.

> It’s very unlikely you are actually ever...

Proven through product creation and job performance.

> Strength in numbers is a compensation for insecurity.

"strength in numbers". ≠ "economies of scale"

The former is about relative group size, mutual defense within the group, and reducing the risks of aggression against outgroups.

The latter is about increasing the effectiveness of coordinated activity more generally (which, yes, can include defense and aggression), especially those activities that persuade people. Winning hearts and changing minds about issues, especially across faction/party lines.

Making common cause with others who mostly share your views, even if the issues you most care about aren't the same ones, is just good tactics. Making common cause with those you mostly DISAGREE with on the issues that you DO agree on is good STRATEGY.

Originality imposes no attempt at either agreement or disagreement. Suggesting that a person must either agree or disagree (forced dichotomy fallacy) to achieve any desirable outcome misses the point. It is a solution not wanted.

I can't really tell what you're saying here, except that you disagree for some reason.

It is one thing to build political alliances for practical reasons (a necessity if you want to achieve anything), it is entirely another thing to take on every and all opinions of your alliance regardless of their merit. That's a personality flaw that everybody has to one degree or another.

Some people like to think they don't belong to a team. They're usually part of the enlightened centerist both sides are bad team.

That's just what people who belong to a team think. It's actually possible to think for yourself

everyone loves to believe they think for their self, especially those who belong to teams and it is everyone else who are sheep(le).

Well if you question your beliefs then you can arrive at your first principles, and then you can start questioning things people tell you by ensuring that you understand them as derived from your first principles. That's called thinking for yourself and one benefit of doing so is that when other people tell me I'm not thinking for myself, I know that they're wrong because I know that I have direct access to the truth. People who don't think for themselves rely on others for access to the truth.

Sure, some don't, but most do (at least unconsciously), that's just how people behave. Some people consciously try to avoid "playing on a team" with various degrees of success, but it's a bit unnatural and actually quite hard to do.

I agree. Originality is a rare and measurable personality index.

Examples?

I see a lot of “libertarians” on HN and SV in general.

Edit: Ok now I am getting downvoted because I called them libertarians when they’re libertarians.

They call themselves "libertarians" while being, in fact, quite authoritarian. Libertarians support criminal justice reform, including reducing the power of police.

Libertarianism changed a great deal in America in the past 20 years. It’s not what it used to be and has been usurped by the right wing and corporate types.

There is a lot of right-wing content rabbit holes to fall into. Most people aren't inherently looking to understand what others are going through. It can make you think that others are lazy or ungrateful, and that events, even if they span the whole country - in every state and major city, that these events are just overblown.

Which they obviously are not.

No idea but I agree.

Part of me thinks it's 'intellectual elites' here that simply can't fathom not working at a FAANG job making 250k+ and don't understand the problems most people have. And if you aren't working at one of those you must be the ultra silicon valley entrepreneur trying to do the next big thing because money.

Probably downvoted for this but whatever, I think it's the truth. When I first was on this site a few years ago I thought it was a cool forum for geeks, but it's just not that at all really.

"...forum for geeks..."

I think human nature of having opinions and diversity of opinions exist in all groups, no matter how we categorize/stereotype them.

HN has never been a forum for geeks. Y Combinator is an investment company focused on profit, like any other. It and (much of) the HN readership extract that profit from technology, but the money ultimately supersedes the tech. This is worth remembering when reading HN threads on regulation or open source software.

HN is pretty conservative on average.

If you think this, you live in an extremely progressive bubble.

It's mostly technology workers, who tend to be largely liberal. Are you sure it's conservative?

I would guess it's actually that HN has members who aren't from the major tech metros, and people outside of those areas tend to be more conservative (in a relative sense at the very least).

For many, this would be the main place they ever come across those people, which would make it seem unusually conservative.

As a theory, Y Combinator, thus HN, is strongly aligned with startups which, in less hip circles, are "small businesses". Small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them (eg. regulatory capture). It would certainly be nicer if more regulation created a level playing field and actually prevented anti-competitive practices.

To counter balance the above blatant and unfair stereotyping above, I'll add some devil's advocate too: "change the world" type leaders might also be more idealistic and would vote progressive anyway, even if it's not good business sense.

small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them

That doesn't make sense. If someone feels unduly burdened by the status quo, why would they vote to preserve it?

In US Politics, "conservative" often means someone who believes in small government and less regulation.

Regulations tend to take a lot of money to comply with, making it difficult for small businesses to compete with larger ones.

So it is in small business owners' interests to support candidates that claim to be in favor of removing regulatory restrictions.

Which tends to be a Republican talking point (whether or not they actually do anything to advance the cause once elected)

There are people here all over the world. In large parts of Europe liberals prefer low taxes and small state to conservatives who want to give their old voters all sort of gifts and benefits. Probably the American idea of a libertarian is more suited.

In the past I would have associated HN mostly with libertarians and socdems, but it seems to have shifted more conservative than I recall.

The cliche about engineers being STEMlords is not entirely untrue. There is certainly a thing where engineers like to think of themselves as smart, intelligent self-made men who justifiably earned their high salaries in contrast to, say, some dumb humanities major who's now making coffees.

Often it's a libertarian flavor, particularly here in the startup community where the cliche of the self-made-person looms large. Libertarians have some overlap with liberal positions in some areas (personal freedoms in general, drugs specifically) but disagreements in others (government regulation and spending, etc).

In practice though most libertarians today can generally be characterized as conservatives who want freedom in the areas that affect them personally. They want to smoke weed, or get gay married, so those things are good, but they're conservative in most other areas.

It's mostly technology workers ... WITH a strong entrepreneurial skew. That's why the conservative lean, I figure.

I'm shocked, but I get a sense there are more conservatives here than ever before. Or maybe they were always here but now find themselves less prone to self-censorship.

I've been reading HN since the late 2000s and only noticed this post-election. It always seemed as if HN was incredibly liberal. Now there are conservative-leaning voices and opinions cropping up everywhere that are being upvoted as top comments.

I'm seeing a markedly conservative shift in tone.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it feels new.

I think the Trump era emboldened a lot of normally quiet conservatives to be more outspoken in their views.

Particularly in the tech scene, you can get the feeling that everyone is very liberal, and so you better just be quiet and keep to yourself.

Personally, I saw so many people completely overplay their hands when it came to things Trump said or did, that it made me more comfortable having them downvote me through the floor and tell me nasty things because honestly who cares? Someone on the internet disagrees with me. Neat. I can disagree back.

Part of that is maybe just me being four years older though and really has nothing to do with the garbage fire that has been the news and media environment since 2016.

Is it possible that the community stayed with their convictions and it's just you drifting left? It's easy to not notice.

I don't consider myself conservative or an authoritarian yet here on this thread I'm being branded as such.

I think its more likely that some HN users have gone so far to the left that any comment they don't support can only be from the right.

People with the opposite politics say exactly the opposite. Both are illusions—in fact they're the same illusion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Here's an example from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25389506. I could give you a hundred more. Both sides feel like the site is dominated by the other side, to a degree in proportion to the intensity of their own views. In fact this phenomenon is so reliable that one can use it to predict not only a person's politics but how strongly they feel about it.

Other bits on this if anyone cares:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

You know, you've got a sample size here that'd make for a hell of a study. Maybe get hold of Scott Alexander, I hear he's taking some tentative post-doxing-threat steps out of the bunker.

Not even kidding. I'd participate, and I'd be fascinated to see the results.

Not to get too meta, but I think rich people and SV have always tended toward authoritarian; it's not like rich people get hassled by the cops that often. Recall also that SV got its start by selling tech to the military[1]. It's not something sudden.

You have to remember that HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Military_techno...

That's not a true statement about HN. Less than 10% of the community is in SV—it's all over the world and has tons of different "very specific parts of wider society". That's one reason why people argue so much about this stuff. If you think the HN community is SV-friendly or even startup-friendly, it may surprise you that many people in those communities feel like it's exactly the other way around.

Thank you dang for this statistics. No wonder people find these SV extreme ideas weird and even weirder when they try to blame it on 'russian bots' etc. So deep in bubble that they can even grasp the idea what world is out there outside of these SV local ideas.

> That's not a true statement about HN.

I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at least compared to the median in the US.

I'm sure that a website of this level of traffic receives all manner of visitors and participants, but I was specifically referring to the people who created and run it, and set the rules and general expectations of tone/topic on it. (I'm not calling you authoritarian, just "of SV" and not-poor.)

[edit: Also maybe I'm wrong and that the ratio of participants vs authors/operators is so vast that the operators play no part in setting the tone beyond the rules (and of course your hard work), in which case my conclusion should be dismissed and the question about why it seems to skew authoritarian should be reopened.]

There's a fallacy in your question if you think that any of us who work on HN determine anything about what comments show up here. That's a function of the community and is way beyond our control. Literally anyone can make an account and comment.

I think I edited to add my last paragraph right as you were commenting. You're right, of course.

It's just that recent issues have made controversial policing issues much more salient. Speaking for myself, I've always thought that riots are very bad and the police should use extreme force to shut them down - I just never really ended up talking about it until recently, because it was never a tremendously interesting or relevant topic. In general, it's important to remember that any consensus you see on an Internet forum is implicitly selected for people who care enough to talk about the issue.

"Extreme force"?

Do you realize what you are asking for?

I've got a pretty clear idea, yes. I think people who go around wrecking stores, setting fires, etc. ought to be forcibly dispersed, using tear gas and riot shields and such if they won't leave.

(This will unfortunately have to be my last comment on the matter, so sorry in advance for the lack of response - I've been instructed by the mods in the past not to discuss this topic at any length.)

It's been like this for a few years now. I see part of the problem being people who are suddenly rich through high salaries or exits that also suddenly become Republican and don't care about anything but taxes. i.e. civil rights, freedom of the press, etc...

I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats. Many many many people have watched with their own eyes, live on video, what's been going on through the course of this year. We've seen CNN and ABC reporters shot with rubber bullets and accosted on live TV, but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts.

There is a healthy and natural cynicism and suspicion of what appears to be a lop-sided reporting of the occurrences during the protests and riots in 2020. That suspicion may benefit people who are pro-authoritarian because they can play on it, but it doesn't necessarily mean those who are suspicious are pro-authoritarian themselves.

The article does a lot to try to explain what it /doesn't/ classify as a journalist, but never says what it does classify as a journalist. Those definitions are central to the point of the whether or not these stats are actually meaningful in any bigger sense than to say "well duh, of course more people were arrested during a year of protest and riots".

This may dovetail into some of Ben Thompson's stratechery posts into what actually is journalism in this day and age of zero friction and marginal costs to publish/disseminate information...the traditional definitions themselves are changing

I haven’t seen anyone alleging to be a journalist throwing rocks and molotov cocktails. Can you verify this? If this is something we’ve all seen a lot of, then somehow I missed it.

> but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts.

Have we ? Would you like to point out more than 0 ? Since it's "a lot".

> but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts.

I'd like to see some evidence of that happening on scale. If there is no such evidence, I think, perhaps, your comment proves the parent's point.

Is 117 arrests “at scale”? Cause that’s what we’re talking about. Normalize that for riot conditions and it just seems likely a journalist is more likely to get hit by lightening than be arrested. Please don’t do the math on that, elaborating for emphasis.

An arrest is merely an attestation, not proof. Police will charge you for anything they want, they don't have to justify it unless you contest it.

Even "as scale" (whatever that means) arrests can't really be meaningful in this context. If the contention is that police are unjustly targeting journalists, arrests are one tool they can unilaterally employee. It would be interesting to see rates of arrest vs. charges files vs. convictions I suppose.

Would the same logic apply for unrest in Hong Kong and Belarus? "Ah, it's just the riots causing authorities to arrest journalists, literally nothing to see (or read) here!" :P

Yes, 117 arrests is a lot.

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo

he has hundreds(?) of examples if you scroll, but to save some time here's one from portland police

https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/128725192442150502...

Edit: ok searching "press" on the feed maybe like more like tens rather than hundreds with actual video evidence, but im sure i missed some

Wow, downvoted hard just for bringing this information to light. This forum is going downhill and its not because of an "authoritarian" trend in this thread.

So in looking at the first link. I had a hard time finding a single example of anyone pretending to be a journalist, except maybe the owner of the twitter account. What I did find were hundreds of videos of random people getting in fights, the owner of the account talking about the fights he had also engaged in, and a lot of claims about people being part of a secret underground antifi something or other. In reality not one of the videos seemed to be depicting anyone supporting or proclaiming that they themselves were antifi (though I’m sure there are a few somewhere in there) but most especially there was no video of evidence of any of the “secret” antifi activity that the owner of the account seems to be selling in his upcoming book.

As for the second post. It is indeed a person wearing a shirt that says press on it who is not a journalist. However, the given reason was “so he would not be shot by feds” which to me highlights the spirt of this conversation, that there is growing concern as well as some evidence that the country has sifted toward a more authoritarian bent.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there were no rocks or molotovs being thrown in any of the videos I saw, which there were reportedly hundreds of.

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1327774883002998784?s=2...

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1298145371009380352?s=2...

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1296075594896039937?s=2...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/portland-protest-press-throwing-o...

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1296610943514812418?s=2...

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1300690653714591744?s=2...

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/news/read.cfm?id=26109...

From above police report link:

"Portland Fire & Rescue treated two Portland Police members injured by rocks thrown by individuals in the crowd. Both of them went to the hospital for further treatment. One of the rocks (pictured) weighed 9.5 pounds and was thrown by a person in group of people wearing "press" as the officer prepared to ride away on a truck. "

"At about 12:36 a.m., Portland Police began moving the crowd to the west as before. This went on for about twenty minutes. Police made more arrests. During this time people in the crowd mingled with those with "press" written on their outer garments as cover and threw rocks and bottles at police. People with "press" written on their outer garments also threw objects at police. Somebody threw a rock, which broke a window in the vehicle giving public address announcements. Others pelted the same vehicle with rocks causing dents. Other vehicles were dented by thrown objects. At least one car parked along a street had windows broken out when a rock or rocks thrown at police, missed them and struck the car windows. "

Police have people hurling the most vial insults imaginable, for hours. As well as having to endure physical assaults.

This is going to cause some serious psychological damage down the road. No one takes that kind of abuse and comes away unchanged.

The fact that at no point did police simply open fire in mass. Well that is truly impressive.

> The fact that at no point did police simply open fire in mass. Well that is truly impressive.

You think that it's "impressive" (?!) that the police, while working, did _not_ commit mass murder in response to being called names?

What hideous third-world country do you live in? And while many people see the police as degenerates, your description and expectations of them are about as low as a human being could go.

For all the claims and all the links posted, the only crimes I actually saw on video were police assaulting nonviolent people who were acting as press and wearing clothing labeled press. Not really the slam dunk evidence that there are tons of "fake press".

It's true that there was one police report you linked mentioning people labeled "press" attacking officers, and Andy Ngo himself claimed that this is happening. Everything else is just recycling of those claims (e.g. Andy Ngo retweets that Fox News reports that Andy Ngo says fake press are attacking the police).

If this really is happening all the time, I would expect it would be easy to find video evidence of it happening repeatedly, as we do find for other activities that definitely are happening all the time, like police brutality against protestors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95GCraUPiGE.

Andy Ngo is known to use selective editing and openly lies about facts, and is not a valid source on anything\

A single instance of a protestor who falsely claimed to be press, and did not commit any crimes does not prove that people who claim to be journalists are throwing rocks or molotov cocktails.

hmm, well sure seems like he's struck a nerve with those types nevertheless

Journalist is not loosely defined. FTA:

>While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.

Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time high in the U.S.

You have only to look at the numerous comorbid attempts to throw out broad swaths of democratically placed votes to see that it's not about "but are they a true journalist?"

If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist. If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist. If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.

There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they probably shouldn't.

Would you say people aren't software developers unless they are employed by a company to predominately develop software? Because your comment certainly reads like that type of gatekeeping regarding who is and is not a journalist.

> Would you say people aren't software developers unless they are employed by a company to predominately develop software?

Yes, without question. It's tautological.

what about unemployed/retired software developers, and open source contributors?

Doesn't the fact that you had to use different language to communicate their status lead into their point?

no, it questions it

It would perhaps be tautological if the OP had qualified professional software developers, but the tautological definition for "software developer" is "anyone who develops software (irrespective of whether they do it professionally)". If we're going to pick nits, we may as well be accurate, right?

Which was exactly my point. They are limiting the title of "journalist" to exclusively people who have been anointed as journalists by some gatekeeping entity. This rules out hobbyist, freelancers, self employed people, people just breaking into the industry, and all sorts of other people. The software developing equivalents of those people are inarguably part of the software development community. Why wouldn't their counterparts in another industry be considered journalists?

If you don't rule out hobbyists, freelancers, and the self-employed, I can declare myself a journalist, start a blog or a Twitter, and start throwing Molotov cocktails, and if I get arrested for it, that's another arrest of a journalist.

And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.

Where is this trope of Molotov throwing journalists coming from? I have seen it multiple times in this thread and it is just bizarre. No one would consider someone throwing a Molotov a journalist, no one would count such an arrest as the arrest of a journalist, and no one would consider the arrest an attack on press freedom.

The fact that arrests of journalists are being tracked implies that some gatekeeping about who is a journalist is necessary. The clearer the definition is, the more meaningful the statistics will be. That is the only way we would actually be able track whether journalists are being targeted by police.

There is a difference between defining a category of people and gatekeeping a category of people.

What's the difference?

The dictionary definitions of the two might be similar, but there is a big difference in connotation and modern usage.

I would say the focus is on opposite sides of the spectrum. When you are defining a group, the primary focus is on who should be included. The focus of gatekeeping is on the people who should be excluded. This is usually done in order to raise the status of those who are included or those who are setting the rules for inclusion. Those rules are often arbitrary or draconian and are usually set by some central authority (or someone who feels they have such authority). This authority will then be the one who doles out permission for others to participate.

That is where the software developer example comes in. Anyone can join the open source software development community and they will only be judged on the merit of their contribution. They might have never contributed to any OSS. They might have never been paid to develop software. They might have no formal education in software development. None of that would matter if we are defining people based on the merit of their work. However they would likely be excluded in a system that relies on gatekeeping.

A definition of journalists that excludes small scale bloggers, and such would create a different population from say, one that comprised "anyone who self identifies as a journalist", for instance.

> The fact that arrests of journalists are being tracked implies that some gatekeeping about who is a journalist is necessary.

Not really. Just track the statistics for full-time journalists. Then you don't have to engage in gatekeeping of journalism, you're just sensibly excluding full-time bounty hunters who wrote a news article that one time from the statistics on arrests of full-time journalists, even if the bounty hunter was, in that one instance, a journalist.

I admittedly haven't read the article yet (I'll carry the shame until my dying day, etc), but does it take into account that we've had a lot more unrest than usual this year? Even without an uptick in authoritarianism, I would expect more journalists to be arrested in a year with lots of riots and protests against the police than in a calm year. Specifically, you have record numbers of journalists working in close proximity to police officers who (warranted or not) are working long hours with people shouting in their faces (let's say, "conditions for which they're inadequately trained").

Maybe you'll argue that it's authoritarianism either way, and maybe you're technically right, but a top-down directive to arrest journalists sounds a lot different (and scarier) than the situation I described above.

> I admittedly haven't read the article yet (...), but does it take into account that we've had a lot more unrest than usual this year?

If you have more unrest than usual (and it shouldn't be usual at all to have unrest) it's even more important to have more journalists circulating freely and writing/publishing freely: that's how you get to see and understand what's actually going on.

If you don't have journalists doing their job freely, you only have the state propaganda to listen to.

No one is arguing that journalists are unimportant, only that an increase in journalist arrests could be a really scary thing like authoritarianism or it could be that they just had a lot more contact with crankier cops.

Oh yeah I agree with that, I was just arguing that especially because the US had more unrest it makes even more problematic that journalists got arrested.

That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.

> That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.

... or it's the other thing: more journalists in closer contact with crankier cops. Or maybe even some combination of the two. This is my point--we can't draw conclusions from an observed spike in arrests.

Is it a symptom of that, or is it a symptom of the fact that it's much easier for the sorts of people who'd go to protests and do things that get them arrested anyway to call themselves journalists?

> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.

But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.

> If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist.

Yes, you are, and should be protected.

> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.

This is a horrific definition. Being a journalist can't be defined by the willingness of the subjects to be covered. That's stenography.

> If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.

So belief in anything is evidence that you aren't a journalist. Journalists are defined by their income.

>> If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist.

> Yes, you are, and should be protected.

Protected from what? Being arrested for recording a public event, surely. Being arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail, surely not.

So the crucial distinction is what are these journalists being arrested for, and also do we have a surge of people who are trying to cover their own knowing illegal behavior by wearing a PRESS badge.

With the collapse of local newspapers -- and what local newspapers remain often eschew investigative reporting due to lack of resources or unwillingness to alienate patrons -- there are many places where someone maintaining a local news blog as a side gig is the important local press. These people definitely deserve to be seen as "real journalists".

> Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time high in the U.S.

Those two things are not the same, and in many ways aren't even connected within the context of this article.

1. The article's definition of journalist would allow me to claim that I'm a journalist. I would never consider myself as such, nor would any reasonable person, yet my photography has adorned the covers of published books, my writing has been published on respected news sites, and I've been invited as a speaker to conferences as an authority on a variety of subject matters.

"Some track record of journalistic work" is a very low bar, depending on the meaning of "journalistic work" and "some track record".

"self-identifying as a journalist" is an even lower bar.

2. If you'd read the article, they even assert that half the incidents reported occurred to people not associated to any known or major media organizations and presumed to be freelancers.

So, I don't think it's just "splitting hairs", the definition is central to the validity of their methodology. Is there a problem with growing authoritarianism in the US? In my opinion, yes, unequivocally. I've been discussing this matter in my circles for more than a decade. The revelations from Snowden, the work the CATO Institute/Radley Balko did on police militarization and brutality, no-knock warrants, asset forfeiture, etc. are all strong evidence of a persistent and growing authoritarian trend in the US. That may or may not validate the evidence in the article, but the way the article states it's evidence and methodology comes very much down to semantics about what it means to be a "journalist", and that is not a decided question in 2020. One can recognize and acknowledge growing authoritarianism in the US while at the same time pointing out flaws in the article and it's associated study methodology.

I think it is not in good faith to try to tar people who bring up good questions about definition as "splitting hairs", or being pro-authoritarian, or in other ways trying to straw man their position. You can be anti-authoritarian, be against police brutality and the suppression of the press, have observed with your own eyes credentialed reporters being harmed and assaulted by the police in 2020, and still want to know with some specificity what this study considers to be a "journalist" for the purpose of reporting their stats.

You hit the nail on the head.

If it's someone who has a shred of journalistic integrity, simply observing, recording and/or interviews regardless of their political stance, then I'm absolutely against their arrest. While I'm also against cherry picking journalism, oh well, they cant be targeted either.

If you're in one hand with a camera and the other hand a rock or molotov cocktail, you're not a journalist. Too many folks are claiming to be journalists when they're not and for me, that ain't right. This leads to governments being allowed to be authoritarian with, sadly, very good reason that will convince mass populations to vote against the freedom of the press.

How these two types of individuals are being confused, that's beyond me. Again, I think we should all just go back to being hunter gatherers and fight bears for blueberries at this rate.

> I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats.

This itself is an authoritarian tendency that is increasingly alarming me lately (a feeling that started after 9/11.) I think we're going to see "journalist" becoming a licensed profession within the next 20 years, which is a commonality amongst all authoritarian dictatorships. When people start talking about who is or isn't a journalist, and identifying ideological opponents as not journalists, the only outcome is a media that is defined as legitimate by how loyal it is.

Citizens United is a great case to read in this context.

Only approved organizations could publish on the election after a certain date.

We are soaking the propaganda and we don’t know it.

BRCA which citizens united partially struck down had no approved organization list, and no ban on publishing

> identifying ideological opponents as not journalists

The trend that I'm more worried about is identifying journalists as ideological opponents. Or even as "enemies of the people".

> When people start talking about who is or isn't a journalist, and identifying ideological opponents as not journalists, the only outcome is a media that is defined as legitimate by how loyal it is.

What is it about so many of the commenters in this thread that they're allergic to good faith objectivity? When you write a study for publication, or arguably when you report about a study, one of the things you're responsible for doing is to define any terms which may otherwise be ambiguous for their usage within the context of the study. Defining what this one study / article means by the word "journalist" is not the same thing as gatekeeping, and it certainly isn't some slippery slope of demanding that journalism be a licensed profession. I haven't seen a single comment advocating for that. What I am consistently seeing is several people asking "For the purposes of this study, what qualifies as a "journalist"." Which is a very fair question and deserving of a good faith response.

> we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts

Ive watched a lot of livestreams of the protest and never once saw a livestreamer throw a rock or molotov cocktail

The livestreamers with sufficient common sense aren't going to do that and leave the most blatant evidence in the world lying around for their inevitable conviction. It's a bit harder (though not impossible) to hide that on a stream where you don't get to selectively edit.

I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it is that, as the power of the tech industry has grown, journalists have become more active in exposing how it abuses that power to make the country, and the world, a worse and more degrading place to live in, and people on HN don't like being reminded of how they contribute to that.

There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.

HN has always been pretty far to the right. There is a strong Trump contingent. A huge "law and order" (but not when disrupting when laws are "ridiculous and dumb") contingent.

On HNs it is normal to denigrate the "MSM" while cheering on some blogger and his completely unsubstantiated claims. Attacks on the press, because there's a strong Trump contingent here that have an issue with reality and fact having an "anti-Trump bias", are cheered on.

It isn't surprising at all.

Being anti-"journalist" isn't the same as being pro-authoritarian.

99% of institutional journalists are sockpuppets for prog neoliberal authoritarianism. I can think of a single-digit number of well-known journalists who I actually respect and generally expect to provide useful/unbiased information. This isn't a left/right authoritarian/libertarian thing - anti-corpo-journalist sentiment is pretty widely shared across the spectrum.

Being in favour of, or okay with, journalists being arrested for doing journalism is _intensely_ authoritarian, whether you agree with them or not. Especially if you disagree with them, really.

I believe your phrase "for doing journalism" is what the debate is truly about here. We would have to have information about the full context of each of the journalist's and police's actions to make a justifiable judgement. As others have mentioned, the majority of arrests may have occurred as a result of strong misunderstandings of "freedom of the press"

Genuinely curious, but why do you think those arrests would have peaked this year of all years otherwise?

I think it's wrong to arrest journalists for doing journalism, but I don't really care about legally punishing "journalists" doing "journalism", where "journalism" is targeted violent harassment, slander, vandalism, etc.

The whole internet has slowly been shifting that way it seems.

During the Anonymous era and Snowden leak era HN and the internet seemed much more anti-authoritarian.

It's truly scary times we live in... It feels like the entire word has developed an authorization bend.

The United States has a sitting president who is attempting a self-coup with the majority of the legislatures in his party supporting it, or at least not condemning it.

It's just... shocking.

You make your claims as if it was fact and yet it isn't. Millions of people in the United States think you're completely brainwashed. The same way as somebody a few years ago that was freaking out that Obama was building work camps to force all gun owners into. For somebody outside of your echo chamber your viewpoints sound ridiculous.

It repeats for Americans over and over like a tape. The outrages literally copy themselves just switching sides. It's very hard to even discuss these matters with Americans since they have both picked their favorite football team and hold onto their dogmas just middle age church.

The sitting president and his allies are actively trying to bypass millions of votes by asking state legislatures to appoint electors against the state's voters' will. That's a fact. Well, they did until that didn't work. Then they tried to throw out the electoral votes of four swing states. Trying to bypass an election like this is indeed a coup-attempt! I've got sources and everything! I've put a few sources below but I'm sure you can find more. These attempts to throw out millions of votes is not normal.

DeSantis urged Pennsylvania and Michigan residents to call state lawmakers and urge them to intervene. “Under Article 2 of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring law, then they can provide remedies as well,” he said. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...

Texas, supported by President Trump, tried to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, claiming fraud, without evidence. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945617913/supreme-court-shuts...

"After waiting over a year to challenge Act 77, and engaging in procedural gamesmanship along the way, they come to this Court with unclean hands and ask it to disenfranchise an entire state," they wrote. "They make that request without any acknowledgment of the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash." --SCOTUS https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejec...

1) Donald Trump is trying desperately and very publicly attempting to overturn the results of a legitimate, constitutional, and legal election.

2) A coup d'état is defined as an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power.

3) A self-coup is coup d'état by a leader who originally came to power legally.

3) Ergo Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election is an attempted self-coup

4) Few Congressional Republicans have condemned this coup attempt, and, in fact, seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of Republicans in the House of Representatives signed an amicus brief supporting it.

These are all provable facts.

Doh! Authoritarian got autocorrected to authorization.

We try to reason about the world. When the world appears to be unjust and we feel powerless to change, we (humans) tend to fabricate justifications for the actions of others. So that we feel better about themselves and we can move on thinking bad things won't happen to us.

This is how you see someone getting beaten during an arrest and people are like "but this guy was once arrested for such and such". The assumption being, since they are "bad" people, that's the reason why bad things happen to them. And, therefore, that won't happen to "me". This requires one to ignore the fact that force wasn't called for.

In this particular thread you see that: "they must have been doing other things rather than just filming" – while we have seen multiple, documented, instances of people doing precisely nothing.

We also see "No True Scotsman": "What exactly is the definition of a journalist?". Which would be fine if we were just trying to understand the methodology, but not "these weren't actually journalists, therefore, they shouldn't count and everything is normal".

It's a tough reality check for a lot of people who grow up in the US, thinking it's a free country with equal protection of the law, when they realize that there are at least two tiers of protected overclasses (wealthy landowners, and the police) to which only subsets of the law applies in practice (to say nothing of the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers).

It's not a small adjustment in one's worldview, and it's normal and common for people who have benefitted from the false narrative to want to cling to it and reject contradictory evidence, as you pointed out.

These are pretty outrageous claims you're making, and you'll notice that the people making such claims never have evidence to back it up. Your viewpoints are grounded in thousands of other people in the same echo chamber as you repeating the same claims as a cultural weapon to gain political power, but there's never anything backing it up. I don't care how many people you've convinced to hold these beliefs, it doesn't make it true.

You say that I want to reject contradictory evidence, but you never provide the contradictory evidence. Having a bunch of people convinced that the police are evil isn't contradictory evidence. Having people repeat your viewpoint isn't proof that the viewpoint is correct.

For an extraordinary claim you need extraordinary evidence. For something like your anti-police sentiment (which is funny because now all of the sudden nearly all police are evil, in all states, all counties, no matter the gender or race breakdown of the police, no matter what city/county/state/department laws and procedures are, all of the sudden police are all just evil? That's curious isn't it?) it isn't backed up by evidence. You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing. Of course mistakes are made, when there's millions of interactions between citizens and police every day, a one in a million or even one in a billion mistake still happens, humans aren't perfect. But for the claims you're making there should be extraordinary evidence, and there isn't any.

Now, somebody else in the world will read your comment and in some part incorporate it into their viewpoint, and repeat it elsewhere, just propagating the idea further.

> You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing

You've never seen the Rodney King video?

Or the George Floyd video? Or the Eric Garner video? Or read about Breonna Taylor?

You're attacking a straw man. The claim isn't that police (or the rich) are evil, but that they are immune, or at least relatively so.

Of course immunity leads to more bad behavior. How could it not?

> the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers

Most of the people I know have been beaten or robbed at least once, or narrowly escaped being beaten or robbed. In almost all cases, the perpetrators were never caught. Are we the underclass?

The vast majority of cases of assault, robbery, and murder are not carried out by wealthy landowners or the police. If you're that concerned with people being beaten, robbed, and killed, your priorities should be different.

The majority of theft is done by wealthy owners (wage theft), or by the police (civil asset forfeiture).

As for murders, most of them are from people you know, there is a vanishingly small chance that you are killed by someone that you do not know unless you yourself are a criminal.

But murders and beatings yes are an exception. Outside of times of war, where you again are likely to die or get seriously injured to protect the interests of the owner class.

Also, criminals are generally not prosecuted very often because it's not that important to the system that you get justice, really. With police, it's different, because it's not a question of not caring, but instead of actual accountability.

This is the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are.

Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread.

It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things.

Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

> When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write.

It'd be very interesting to see how a short delay of posting comments on new post would impact this.

Compared to other vote-based sites, HN is very health - but to your point, reflexive, shallow comments are the easiest.

A slightly modified version would be to delay on post depth (assuming less depth = more delay)

If you take it to the extreme, a youtube video being posted and everyone having to wait 5 minutes to comment, there is enough people that will see it at 4.30 to have a visceral reaction and post inflammatory comments. You can extend that down to each level of comments.

HN already does this to some degree, the "reply" button is hidden as you get deeper into a tree of comments.

You can, of course, click on the timestamp and see it anyway, so it's more of a speedbump for folks who don't know all of the details of how the forum works than a true delay, though.

I was thinking about a similar scoring strategy for comments as is applied to articles. Articles which generate more comments than upvotes are deprioritized. Perhaps comments that garner more comments than upvotes could similarly be deprioritized (not unlike reddit penalizing controversial opinions [those with both upvotes & downvotes] )

I'm envisioning a use-case for this would be when say, an article briefly touching on tech interviewing (or with a title about tech-interviewing) is posted, and immediately the top-comment changes the subject to "Boy tech interwiews really grind my gears!" Suddenly everyone wants to vent and the thread is overwhelmed.

One natural reason for this penalty is that a highly-ranked comment brings along all the comments that ride along with it to the top. The most extreme form is when the entire comment page is a single comment-thread.

Alternatively, a flexible proposal is to allow users to choose their sort preference, like they can on reddit.

We've seen the outcome of this. It's the turbo echo chamber that people here bemoan all the time.

I wish there were an effective way to distinguish between upvotes-as-agreement (or amusement) and upvotes as distinguishing between signal and noise. That seems to be one of the biggest problems in large communities that rely on it. (besides, like, clearly offensive and moderateable behavior)

So, I don't think there is one. At least not one compatible with democratic-like systems.

The fundamental issue here, at least to me, is that the upvote is an "I like this" signal. The instinctive use of an upvote is to see more of what you like. Turns out that what people like is what people already agree with.

Unless you build a strong culture that values the signal/noise ratio (remember that early reddit had much more of "UPVOTE IS NOT A DISAGREE" culture, hivemindy as it was), you're not getting your desired outcome. Worse, if you let in the mobs, it doesn't matter how principled your initial group was as they'll soon be overwhelmed by the crowd. The historical record there is obvious.

I think the only way about this is gate-keeping. You want that culture, you'd better enforce it. If you somehow start with a seed userbase of principled people, you only allow people voting rights once they meet whatever gatekeeping criteria that you've set. I don't think this is that scalable, but smaller more tightly knit communities might be a plus to some.

Actually, I'm wondering if something like this might have a niche out there somewhere. We know that Digg in the old days had the superuser group, and the strength of reddit was it's specialized subreddits. Would a system crossing specialized subs with hierarchical user privileges (viewer/voter/voter_with_grant_privs) be something that could work?

The fundamental problem is that people will treat upvotes as agreement, even in communities who set out to make sure this isn't the case. I stopped posting at tildes.net recently, which has this exact problem with upvotes in spite of this being a cultural pain point that caused so many of tildes' users to leave reddit.

In a way it's sort of evolutionary. People attempt to propagate their own ideas or similar, and remove ideas they dislike from the meme pool, via voting systems.

Is there any datasets made available about this? Given our current inability to discuss things online without disastrous consequences, seem like it could be useful.

Presumably you are talking about HN discussions but what your are saying sounds extremely general

Is there a way to get timestamp data from these threads? I'd be interested in analysing some of these and sharing some results and examples of this at work.

All the comments are timestamped. The HN API has all that, and you can probably also look at other sources, e.g. Google BigQuery's copy of the public HN dataset.

Reddit couldn't be a better example of the fact that culture is absolutely set by moderation policies. But whatever you say, dang.

This is a throwaway because I've deleted the passwords to my past 5-digit karma accounts because of my disgust with the commentor's of this site's obsession with freeze peach and their prepondency for posting misinformation.

Has anyone gone back and looked at Corona threads from earlier this year? Remember when HN was telling everyone that there was absolutely no societal harm posed by anti-science folks pushing anti-vaxx and flat-earth theories?

Meanwhile I know that numerous others like me have lost all interest in participating and have left. Because this is what happens when comment sections aren't moderated properly.

“Reflexive and shallow” seems to be a “talking point” on HN today.

The parent post to this was talking about a pro-authoritarian slant, not the quality of post. Pro-authoritarian =/= reflexive, shallow, generic, angry. Can be. So can anti-authoritarian. Just as much. Sometimes more. Much more.

I don’t know how the pro-authoritarian observation leads to the analysis above. Frankly, I don’t see the pro-authoritarian slant from the top posts.

The whole discussion I’m reading is about the changed/expanded definition of a “journalist” for gathering stats. A valid, almost instinctive observation because practically everyone has a high-quality video camera in their pocket nowadays. And has then wondered, “well, if I capture an event, am I a journalist?” Not a deep life-changing musing, but everybody who has recorded a video event on a smartphone has thought it. So the 2020 mind is primed with those thoughts.

A result like this is posted, and the definitional issue is immediately brought to mind, because it isn’t that far away from lived current experience. The only issue I have with the discussion is nobody answered the basic question in the top responses...so was the definition of journalist responsible for the effect?

The name-calling against “pro-authoritarian” suggests that, in fact, it was. But just a guess.

The guy above was arguing the pro-authoritarian slant would emerge first simple because HN is so big, that some people must have that slant, and those are the people who will react first.

After that, will be a wave of complaints about the first responders (e.g. in this case he pro-authoritarians). This wave gets upvoted heavily to sit at the top.

So when you and I arrive 9 hours after the drama, we'll see the top X comments either complaining about a slant that is now down-voted, or up-voted comments being reflective of the true biases of HN.

That's basically what happened here.... it's not that the pro-authoritarian comments are naturally shallow, is that they were merely the first comments posted in the first seconds after the article was posted, and are just reflexive since no one reads an article in seconds. If we post an article with a pro-authoritarian title, we'll get a wave of reflexive anti-authoritarian comments too.

Exactly!

Shouldn't there be an equal contrarian dynamic among anti-authoritarians?

I suppose there is, and it's segregated by thread. Some topics attract first responses from libertarian anti-authority types, such as crypto and intellectual property.

But even so there's a kind of overlap. It's anti-authority when it comes to obligations, and pro-authority when it's about property. Or more generally, anti-authority about us, pro-authority about them.

That's not so much "contrarian" as simply "selfish", but it does have the "pent up energy" that dang mentioned. And yeah, I do think you see a lot more selfishness on HN than in the past.

It would be interesting to see if it was a recent shift, my feeling is that is not that recent, but I could easily be wrong.

A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right.

I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary.

This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.

It is known as brigading. They see a post critical of police and the right wing people come in and do a bunch of posts to obscure the fact that BLM and the police accountability movement is extremely popular.

It is 100% planned and engineered. They know their talking points. They know what to point to in response to police accountability discussions. Change the subject to talk about random looters instead of the 99% of protestors who peacefully assemble and then are brutalized night over night.

Same. I've been seeing more "the boot is justified unless proven otherwise, and no I don't need to provide a source; and if it is proven otherwise, I've already lost interest and moved on." and less "innocent until proven guilty." Obviously there's some of both and always has been, but I feel the same as you do.

I remember when a website counting how many days James Clapper has avoided a prison sentence after he gave a false statement was big on the front page a while back.

Just the other day there was a thread about experts identifying an illegal toxin used on protestors in Portland while LE illegally blocks access to storm drains so that further evidence of it cannot be collected.

Both threads pertain to law enforcement overstepping their bounds with impunity and secrecy. The toxic gas one was flagged off the front page despite 125 upvotes in a short time.

https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-identified-a-green...

I see more interest in parsing the numbers beyond just 'arrests'. I think it is worth looking into what kind of arrests these are and the nature of them.

Pretty simple. Most of us have jobs, follow the law and do not recommend others break it either.

Except when it comes to things that directly benefit them ofc (i.e piracy)

Honestly piracy is something that most people with jobs don’t have time for. Keeping up with where to get what is a chore. Netflix and Spotify do it for me thanks

first they came for the socialists

No shift - it's just that most people espouse their convictions with an unstated parenthetical that those convictions only apply when it furthers the power ambitions for them or their allies. Not much else explains e.g. how Julian Assange's rep has changed in the past 10 years.

I'm sure if anyone responds to this, it will be to tell me why Julian's case is actually different and now he's dangerous for democracy...but sorry, no, his case isn't different. You're just a hypocrite.

If you subscribe to the debt cycle theory by Ray Dalio [1], late cycles see a rise of inequality, populism and finally authoritarianism. (I am skeptical.)

[1 ]https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/ray-dalio-late-long-term-d...

I'll dare to ask this, but what defines a "journalist" in the data points here? The Clark Kent types are the only ones I really understand that can live under that title - but with the advent of syndication and micro-journalism (to use a term I just made up) for regional markets that have no real local presence of classic journalism, interested to know what it means now.

Here in Buffalo, could go many directions.

“While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.“

Looks like you’d have to produce some journalistic work in the past. Unclear if that’s a blog or having your worked printed in a major publication.

It's a completely circular definition (as far as I can see).

Defining now from In the past?

Don't think that's necessarily circular.

I think it's more of a "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck." If you call yourself a journalist and have a record of reporting on things, then by this definition you are one. But you can't decide you are a persecuted journalist because you got arrested.

Sure, but at some point you have to define how a duck walks and how it quacks!

You only have to define the behavior:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing

A journalist is someone that does journalism, just like a runner is someone that runs. The behavior "doing journalism" is simply reporting on something to an audience.

Then we're all journalists here for commenting to a global audience.

Sure, but at some point, you have to start by defining "sure".

I've thought that there was nothing special about journalists such that you required a rigorous definition. Journalists shouldn't have more power than citizens, journalists are citizens that choose to exercise their civil rights to bring information to the public.

And this is the reason why BLM where vests that say press but then those same people are attacking police. They want to abuse the special privileges the press get.

The press doesn't get any special privileges. The law doesn't make a distinction between press and not press.

Certain organizations may get special privileges (press passes), but there's nothing legally binding about them. S citizen journalist is still a journalist under the law.

How’s that? Seems like it’s just saying “we’re not going to treat you like a journalist if you don’t claim to be one, and you can’t claim to be one without having done any work before.”

>"this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work"

They're saying that they use journalistic work as a standard of who's a journalist... that's circular.

How else would you define who is a journalist? How can one be a journalist without doing journalistic work?

Are you looking for a definition of "journalism"?

Where "journalistic work" means "has published an article or video that at least purports to be reporting facts, or something equivalent to that".

If you claim to be a journalist, but can't point to something you've published, then you're not included.

If you claim to be a journalist, and can go "here's three articles I published in a local newspaper (for example)", then you're included.

So how can you be a journalist in order to write your first articles if you're not allowed to be a journalist until you've written your first articles?

The point is that this particular site, which reports on police violence against journalists, is being somewhat conservative in how they define journalist.

That seems fine.

> be a journalist in order to write your first articles

Says who? Writing an article is what makes you a journalist. You don't need to be a journalist to write.

This whole "the definition is circular" argument is bizarre, it's like something from Zeno trying to prove that movement is impossible because first you have to move. "So how can you be a mover in order to make your first movements if you're not allowed to be a mover until you've made your first movements?"

Not at all. That's like saying that "a boxer is someone who does boxing" is circular. It's only circular if you define boxing as "that which is done by a boxer", instead of "striking an opponent with such-and-such ruleset, this equipment, etc. in an event sanctioned by such-and-such organization."

They arrest everyone then later can say oh oopsie journalist we let him go.

It's still an obvious authoritatian intimidation tactic and information suppression tactic to be throwing these people in jail and letting them wait sometimes days for the situation to get sorted out.

But that has nothing to do with it being a circular definition.

journalistic work is actually well defined with methodolgy, ethics and authoritative institutions. it's not difficult to prove that some work is journalistic

If someone asks you for a definition of 'rabbit' and you tell them it's 'something that is rabbity' then they're going to ask you what is 'rabbity'... and likely you'd reply 'it's like a rabbit'. Goes in a circle, see?

A journalist is someone who does journalistic things. What are journalistic things? Well they're things a journalist does.

I get what you're saying but "track record of journalistic work" is not as ambiguous as "rabbity". Unless they're being disingenuous one would reasonably expect that means published work or blog/social postings relating to current events.

No one defines journalism as "what a journalist does," so there is no cycle.

If you ask Google to define "journalism," you get, "the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast." See, no use of the word "journalist" in that definition, so no circle.

If I share something newsworthy on Twitter or YouTube, I shared something. I'm not a journalist. If I share something and add context and get perspectives other than my own I performed the work of a journalist. If I do this with some regularity I am a journalist, an amateur journalist but a journalist.

One of the key points of journalism is sourcing. You'll notice professional journalists, even in the middle of a war zone or natural disaster, will do interviews and try to get a larger context of events. They do this even when they're literally in the middle of an event and documented it themselves.

Anyone that went through journalism school is taught just because they see a thing it doesn't necessarily mean they know or understand what they saw. Their eye witness account is as unreliable as anyone else's so they not only admit to that fact but actively try to get other accounts to find all the common elements and context.

Journalism was a historical anomaly based on scarcity of distribution mechanisms. It was only professionalized for a short period of time in human history.

Living near Portland I would say that anyone that puts "PRESS" on their shirt with tape defines themselves as a journalist...or even just someone holding a phone or camera. Same as those medics with a red cross out of tape. There have also been many examples of those 2 groups of people engaging in the violence that seem to think of themselves as immune to police orders because of it.

Unfortunately the videos and pictures of these examples of people hiding behind a designation are ignored by the MSM and are only found by being at the protests, looking at raw video or following ultra-conservative people like Andy Ngo.

This report also doesn't say why journalists were arrested. Many reports show that they were not following police orders to clear an area that has been designated a riot...and simply being part of the press doesn't give you the right to ignore police orders and if the police have to resort to non-lethal force in response to being attacked then being in the area leaves you vulnerable to the same non-lethal force.

Police don't have the time to check everyone's credentials at 1AM while having lasers and fireworks thrown at them when trying to clear out an area.

I dislike the police...but I also feel like they were not treated fairly in 2020, especially in places like Portland.

I’ve personally seen this repeatedly, and people have their heads so far in the ideological sand that they downvote you for some reason. It’s true, “independent journalists” wearing PRESS are basically an in-joke in the PNW. If there is one thing they are great at, it’s propaganda. They somehow managed to convince the rest of the country that they’re the good guys and the good guys are violent racists. Nothing could be further from the truth.

care to provide any sort of evidence?

If you need some evidence of what is actually happening, then I recommend following Andy Ngo on Twitter. It's certainly only one view point of the protests that are going on, but its a side you won't see covered anywhere else.

Any credible sources? Andy Ngo is a propagandist for atomwaffen and heavily edits what he releases to strip it of context and present a narrative that is often directly contrary to the truth.

How do you define credible? Someone that releases information that you agree with? His videos are often releases of what Antifa publishes and rarely of his own recording (mostly because he has been violently attacked in the past by them). Stop excluding sources because you don't like the information...take in as much data as possible and make your own conclusion. When protestors are going into residential neighborhoods and causing conflict with people that are minding their own business...or throwing fireworks or other projectiles at the police...you can't say that's not happening and is contrary to the truth.

Yeah and I don't care if people down vote me. That won't make me change my mind or change the things I have personally witnessed. If people wish to believe the MSM reporting then fine, but I won't be bullied into changing my mind.

There are bad guys on both sides, but the ones I've seen being most violent are attacking cops and people that are expressing their freedom of speech while staying within the law...all while crying poor me the cops used teargas (some were even caught on video setting fires before this).

> Andy Ngo

He's already been exposed as a fraud, alt right collaborator, doxxer of innocent victims.

In general, US law makes little distinction, and with good reason---the easiest way to curtail freedom of the press would be to give government the authority to declare some citizen's aren't really press.

Most of them aren’t though. Portland has a ton of antifa kids running around with “press” signage who are also help organizing things, passing intel, or blatantly assaulting cops. Do that a couple times and “PRESS” means nothing. You should be upset with the rioters, not their victims.

Some of the rioters are victims, so I'll be upset with all kinds of people.

In general, it's somewhat irrelevant whether someone declares themselves to be press because there are scant laws that declare the press is allowed to do X while a normal citizen can't. The "PRESS" signage should, in theory, be a useful signal to law enforcement that someone isn't there to make a disturbance (this, of course, breaks down if rioters mis-apply the label, but the end result is they endanger the press more than benefit themselves, since the cops can arrest a person breaking the law whether or not they have a particular symbol on their uniform).

Regarding "be a useful signal to law enforcement that someone isn't there to make a disturbance , and also regarding the notion that anyone could slap a press sign on themselves... seems apparent that, to a certain extent, there's an amount of civilization's underpinnings assume well-intent.

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative's data showed that even in 2019 the "The US scores for Safety from the State are disturbingly poor".

https://humanrightsmeasurement.org/the-us-scores-poorly-in-h...

Funny fact: this organization is from New Zealand and amongst other issues, discusses the "right to work" in the US. Turns out that "right to work" means something different in NZ than it does in the US. In NZ it means "can actually make an honest living".

In the US you can generally determine what a law really stands for by putting 'anti-' in front of it.

"Right to work" laws are about unions. Perhaps you're thinking of at-will employment.

Not sure I'd be citing that group. Their methodology is suprisingly opaque.

Honest question: why were these journalists arrested? Do you actually have to commit a crime or can you be arrested as part of crowd control technique and released later? Did these journalists actually commit a crime? Will they be charged with something in court?

The police were attempting to intimidate and silence them is the honest answer.

I'm not sure if any were charged with anything that stuck, because likely none of them committed any actual crimes. It's just police abusing their power.

> The police were attempting to intimidate and silence them is the honest answer.

> likely none of them committed any actual crimes

What makes you say that?

I've done some googling, and can't find any instances were a journalist was actually convicted. All I can find is instances that they weren't charged or charges were dropped.

Several of these cases involved a blogger(or other small syndication) confronting police who were responding to an incident. You don't have to look far to see these encounters on youtube. I'm not justifying the police in these situations, however the "journalists" were doing much more than observing; bordering on obstruction.

The fact that the cops arrested people observing from their front porches?

Reading history is the honest answer.

You read enough good books and articles about current events and history and then are able to make reasonable inferences.

Suppressing, or evening worse distorting historical knowledge is always a tool of authoritarians and oppressors.

Which is imho part of why so many folks here in the U.S. are so historically illiterate :/ :(.

That was also my impression from several high-profile instances of journalists being arrested this year. Here's one specific example: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-arres.... They're arrested for not standing where they were told, but at least from the portion of the interaction caught on camera, the journalists just seem confused about where they were supposed to stand and were willing to follow instructions.

> What makes you say that?

Watch the Lafayette Square clearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L1gZApugd0

Now notice a few things:

1. The first cop who throws a punch at them is clearly abusing his power.

2. A 2nd cop realizes what's going on, pulls the 1st cop off the news crew, and provides a place for the news reporters to run away. (This isn't clear from the Australian news camera. But some people filmed this incident from a 2nd or 3rd angle. The news crew was defended by one of the cops)

The officers who wish to intimidate the media exist. But there are also officers who realize this is a very, very bad idea.

-----------------------

The right-wing media (which a large number of cops do follow) have been describing "the mainstream media" as the enemy of the people for years. Its not surprising that those particular cops who listen to that message are now beginning to throw punches at media crew.

We're now seeing the results of that indoctrination. If the media is the enemy, then it is "fair" to arrest, punch, and otherwise intimidate them.

The officers who wish to intimidate the media exist. But there are also officers who realize this is a very, very bad idea

We are supposed to have a rule of law because we can't rely on the beneficience of individuals. The fact that there may be good cops doesn't change the fact that, by and large, they act as if they are above the law because they in fact are. The reluctance of prosecutors and juries to address even clear police misconduct is well documented.

She herself says that they were "indiscriminate" and that they didn't care whether she was media or not. You are trying to make a big narrative that your video doesn't support.

The first thing Police Officer#1 does when the line breaks is rush over to the cameraman and punches the camerman in the face.

Its pretty clear from Officer#1's actions that he did not like that camera.

----------

Here's an alternative angle, in case you're confused by the 1st person perspective: https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/12312456-16x9-xlarge.png?v=...

It is very clear that this officer is attacking the cameraman. The only two people on that corner are the cameraman and the reporter, and given their equipment and press-badges, it is very obvious that they're media. (Not "little blogger on random website". Its obvious that they are big-media, ABC 7 to be specific).

-----------

It should be noted that Trump was clearing the area to give a press briefing. The press belonged there, if only to cover the President's new announcement in a few minutes.

The protesters had a right to be there too (but I realize this is a harder point to sell to conservatives and am willing to keep this as an aside). But it was clear that Trump chose to clear this particular group of protesters as an intimidation factor. There was no need for Trump to give a press briefing in this location (when he was already giving a briefing from the White House). Trump knew there were protesters here and wanted to physically intimidate them with a police clearing.

This angle is much clearer, yes.

- Disturbing the peace

- Resisting/obstructing an officer

- Failure to disperse

- violating curfew (journalists are exempted here)

According to the report most charges are being thrown out. Do reporters have immunity to the first 3 violations in that list during a protest?

They should, yes. "Disturbing the peace" seems to be fabricated, and resisting and officer and failure to disperse should not be applied to journalists given our press freedoms.

> "Disturbing the peace" seems to be fabricated

Aren't all laws 'fabricated' by legislators? But disturbing the peace is a law like any other, whether you think it's a 'natural' or 'fabricated' law. It's pretty ancient more like natural laws.

Disturbing the peace is a valid law, however, if the police unilaterally assert that someone filming police actions is "disturbing the peace", that's simply a fabrication that as no disturbing the peace has actually been done by that person.

I watched a lot of live streams from local Portland journalists and they were arrested (wearing PRESS helmets) for no reason other than being near the protests.

After a while it became clear it was to deter them from returning to the protests the next day.

The Portland DA dropped all charges except felony rioting (lighting fires) for most protesters.

I live in Portland and watched many of these press people via Twitter. The reality is that many of these “press” are activists who document their activism and the activism of their comrades. They call themselves press, but they are press+activist. As a result they are often in the crowd of people throwing stuff at police, while screaming “hey you fucking fascist, aren’t you embarassed to be an authoritarian?”

I am not saying that they are better or worse than traditional press, which I have a strong aversion to, I am just saying they are not impartial and are very often just Twitter journalists who are protesting at the same time they are working, and as such these numbers don’t tell the full story. I happily follow them to see on the ground footage, but you have to take their editorial viewpoint with a huge grain of salt.

*Edited to add "many" in describing press, since my original statement implied all, which is obviously not true.

> I am not saying that they are better or worse than traditional press, which I have a strong aversion to, I am just saying ...

So you’re saying you just don’t like the press, basically.

Except maybe the press that says what you like?

Because tbh everything you wrote just sounds like a lot of authoritatively-stated opinion.

Which tells me that you’re either uneducated about facts-, or, looking to shift the conversation away from facts.

For that matter, what’s wrong with activism? And activism against what, specifically?

You don’t even mention that. Just “activists”.

LOL I watch twitter too and didn’t see what you saw. Here:

https://www.opb.org/news/article/aclu-sues-portland-oregon-p...

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2020/06/07/portland-reporter...

“ Video taken from a helicopter by WW's news partner KATU-TV around 11:45 pm on June 6 shows a person filming police in Chapman Square, until an officer turns to him, hits him with a baton and twice pepper-sprays him in the face.

... “‘As the man sputtered and spit and gasped, I, for reasons that I'm sure are clear, shouted to get the fuck off his neck,’ Farley recalls. ‘This is the moment a fourth officer approached, reaching for his baton.’

Farley says he believes officers targeted him because he was filming the arrest.“

Press-activists indeed.

Hey I am not saying police misconduct is not a problem. I would like to see some police reform myself, I myself have been a victim of unfair policing despite growing up white and middle class.

I can agree that police misconduct happens, while also say that many of the journalists in Portland covering the protests are literally there participating in protesting as well by virtue of what they are doing and what they say. I can also say this while respecting the work they are doing as journalists (which is why I follow them). These are not mutually exclusive statements as far as I can tell.

Fair enough. I appreciate your response. I had gotten a very different impression from your previous comment, FYI. Maybe I was too angry when I was writing myself.

While some journalists in Portland may be actively engaged as you describe, I think it's inaccurate and unfair to expand that into a generalization of most journalists in Portland.

Well I think you almost nailed the point - when the police declare a riot, and start rounding everyone up who doesn't disperse, the media gets rolled up with that as well many times - especially if you are livestreaming via a gopro and not with a NBC news truck (though we saw journalists with institutional backing get hit with rubber bullets this year as well)

> not with a NBC news truck

Reminder that a CNN journalist was arrested during a live broadcast this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftLzQefpBvM

I'm not sure riot declarations are supposed to allow the police to arrest journalists this way. (And if they are, we should challenge them on Constitutional grounds.)

Definitely. And again, not saying there aren't issues here, just that we are moving to a more citizen based journalism model, and by doing that we are increasing the number of journalists 10x, and with this comes some interesting change in journalism itself.

These journalists are (1) harder to identify, (2) have a different relationship to the news in that they aren't traveling to cover a news event, they are local citizens concerned about an outcome and documenting an event that often, then are emotionally strongly connected to, and (3) there is no governing body or corporate rules or sponsors that make their actions understandable and predictable.

Citizen journalism gives me more valuable insight into what is happening on the streets, though it takes more work on my part to sort through and develop my own narrative. I mostly discount the narrative journalists apply and try to figure out the facts from the material presented (except when I am consuming opinion pieces, where my explicit goal is to evaluate someone's narrative and viewpoint). I think this model holds some promise, though I am concerned that the sheer volume of material makes this untenable except the privileged few who have the time or mental space to through it all. Also, traditional media sources are just buying up these videos and accounts rather than sending their own crews, so we are already seeing this stuff applied nationwide, regardless whether someone views it on twitter or reads about it on a news website.

Impartiality is not a defining attribute of journalism. Having and expressing opinions (when not immediately involved in a scene), setting an editorial slant, and being embedded in events are not counter-journalistic practices. Journalists are “neutral” only in the sense that they seek to observe and not to alter the events as they unfold. In many situations this is not tenable in any absolute degree, but the independent journalists I've watched here in Portland over the past six months have overwhelmingly made their best effort of trying to stay out of the way of police and interact with people very much as reporters, taking in information and interviewing participants to solicit perspective and details.

I am sure that this happens. However, legitimate journalists who are trying to cooperate with the police and are not protesting are also arrested: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-a...

why were these journalists arrested? Did these journalists actually commit a crime?

The article contains this info at a high level and links to more in-depth info about it. Some jurisdictions make arrests public, btw. And all you need to make an arrest is "probable cause", so you might not always get a satisfying answer about why a journalist was arrested. Since you're asking honestly, I'm going to be honest with you. We're talking about well over 100 arrests here. It's dishonest to lump all these situations together and the HN community is not equipped to give you the info you seek anyway. Arrest records are, court records are, first hand reports are, and it is relatively easy to find this stuff, if you're honestly curious. Since this happened so recently, you can also reach out to the people directly involved. Some reports may contradict each other. Some common threads may appear.

Do you actually have to commit a crime or can you be arrested as part of crowd control technique and released later?

You can be arrested without committing a crime.

Will they be charged with something in court?

As some of these are fairly recent matters and court systems are moving slowly due to the pandemic, the answer to your last question might not be clear at this time. This will be public record if they are.

"...court systems are moving slowly due to the pandemic..."

They were moving slowly even before the pandemic. In some places the difference between trial wait times pre/post covid shutdowns is 18 months now being 24 months.

I'm associated with a case that was a summary offense issued in August. It's been continued twice (not related to covid) and won't be heard until January at the earliest. This is at a magistrate level which is supposed to provide quicker resolution than the "real" courts.

As a non-us citizen I don't regard the US as a free country anymore.

Mind you, Bill Clinton was impeached due to the Lewinsky scandal not much for the scandal itself but because he lied about having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and it was considered inacceptable for the president of the US to be lying.

Now you've got Orange Donald lying all the time and nobody's complaining that much, and journalists are getting arrested almost literally more than ever and nobody's batting an eye.

Ridiculous.

How the mighty have fallen.

IMO when the forming of militias became "extreme" (even though it's in the constitution) is when the writing was on the wall. You can't maintain freedom from the govt without keeping it in check.

The public grew an aversion to militia's and we've been boiling the frog with more laws since.

> IMO when the forming of militias became "extreme" (even though it's in the constitution) is when the writing was on the wall.

“Militias” are not in the Constitution.

The militia, collective and unitary, and belonging to the nation as a whole (with regard to which there are both federal and state powers and responsibilities specified), is in the main body of the Constitution, and reference to a, singular, militia as being necessary to (implicitly, each) State is made in the Second Amendment. There is nothing at all in the Constitution about the formation of, or anything else concerning, private militias.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Seems weird to have militia in the same sentence as the right to bear arms. Doesn't sound like its referencing the govt.

> militias

Oh shut up...

The US Police is among the most militarized city-wide armed forces, you want to compare that with a mostly-unorganized group of random people protesting?

Policemen and policewomen with bulletproof vests and automatic rifles on one side, people throwing rocks on the other side.

Don't be silly.

Don't shut down discussion.

civilians don't fight like the police... e.g. Vietnam. Tyranny needs to be more expensive.

Did you hear that Trump was not re-elected?

He didn't.

The difference is Clinton lied under oath.

Trump is under the Oath of Office of the President of the United States.

That probably should count for something.

It's a different oath, you know? One oath is specifically that you tell the truth and nothing but the truth, the other is that you'll protect the Constitution of the United States.

If it was a crime to lie after taking an oath of office, every single senator and congressmember would be in jail

The "record number" seems to be (as the article says) mostly related to the rioting--reporters getting arrested as part of the rioting response.

Doesn't seem like an institutional crisis at all.

Wasn't there a video of clearly identified Australian press in Washington DC getting assaulted by the police? If that's normal...

If you disobey lawful orders from police this is exactly what will happen to you. I don't understand why so many people are surprised by this.

> Assault

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum

It's not that people are surprised. Is that they're starting to say "this isn't okay."

Having accepted abuse in the past does not mean it's some big crazy idea when people start to stop accepting it.

Pointing out the obvious, if you have more violent protests and riots getting news coverage, of course there will be more journalists arrested just because there are more journalists in the middle of situations where they might be arrested.

If you’ve been to some of these events, you’ll notice a large number of antifa people with handmade press passes calling themselves journalists, but also protesting peacefully by throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at cops, Burning buildings, preventing others from using their own cameras, hitting people, and breaking things. Those people are included in this count.

The sad part is that many people won't believe you, even though it's true, because it was intentionally excluded from the reporting of the major news outlets.

> Those people are included in this count.

They are not. You may have missed it when you read the report (it's near the end), but it says "A journalist who attends a demonstration in order to protest publicly, rather than to document the event, and is arrested in that capacity, will not be counted on the site."

Interesting. Why is Committee to Protect Journalists not showing that in their dataset? They seem to include USA in the Country dropdown list. Is it because they were arrested and not imprisoned?

https://cpj.org/data/imprisoned/2020/?status=Imprisoned&star...

This should be the top response to this post.

This is because Black Lives Matter™, and because black lives matter. This isn’t a hyper escalation against freedom of the press, per se, it’s an escalation of police on citizen violence that came about when police felt threatened when folks got a little extra vocal about how the racist cops boys club has little to no accountability when harming citizens they’re supposed to protect. I think this narrowly focuses on transgressions against journos. What the YoY stonks increase on Americans shot by rubber bullets?

When a journalist steps beyond being a journalist and turns into an activist, of course they’re going to get arrested if they break the law. Just because someone is a journalist does not give them a pass from breaking the law.

> Just because someone is a journalist does not give them a pass from breaking the law.

I’m entirely on the side of real journalism so it was interacting to see some people that thought a press badge meant they didn’t need to also follow police orders.

Not following police order is grounds for arrest, not for getting a riot shield bashed into one's face.

I don't know about the US, but here in Canada not following police orders is not by itself grounds for arrest. It has to be a lawful order, not whatever the police fancies at the moment. The police cannot for example say "stop filming or I will arrest you" and be able to legally justify that arrest in the court of law.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6233399/supreme-court-montreal-es...

It's not, which is why you see people arrested this way getting released without charges.

It's an intimidation tactic, and the officers face zero consequences for employing it. "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride" and all that.

Toronto police did very similar things during the 2010 G20 Toronto summit protests. Then chief of Toronto Police is now a cabinet minister. I don't want to insinuate that this kind of behaviour does not happen in Canada. It certainly does, but it doesn't make it right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX0BbLc_PIk

It was a dispersal order to leave a riot so the crowd can be controlled, not an order to stop filming. There’s no other legal and humane way to deal with rioters amongst a crowd. Even if you aren’t being violent or breaking anything, you have to leave when told to do so.

Let me copy my comment here too - sorry for the spam.

"In the video the police had control. There was absolutely zero need to escalate. They were trying to punish and intimidate the crowd instead of trying to disperse or control it. That should cost the commanding officer's job."

The professional way is to identify the instigators/leaders in the crowd and extract them one by one. Also to constantly move the crowd street by street - toward less narrow places.

> You have to leave when told to do so.

And if you don't they might arrest you. Standing there is no cause for smashing faces. They can simply grab the closest persons to the police line, bring them behind the line, arrest them. No need to lash out. This gets the message across. If the crowd starts to escalate, sure, water jets. But even that's usually completely unnecessary. Just pick up the trouble makers one-by-one, usually that means less than a dozen people.

Because if there really is an organized fanatical crowd then the police would likely withdraw, like they did in Seattle "zone".

Same in the US.

But, people are required to obey police commands, unlawful or not, and then seek remedy from the courts afterwards.

And, there is usually a narrow self-defense exception. One can lawfully resist if the police are unlawfully trying to kill you.

In the video the police had control. There was absolutely zero need to escalate. They were trying to punish and intimidate the crowd instead of trying to disperse or control it. That should cost the commanding officer's job.

Can officer give some absurd order just as cause to arrest someone?

Generally, yes. Victims of this tactic are required to obey the absurd orders and then seek remedy from the courts afterward.

There are exceptions related to orders to break the law, put oneself or others into danger, and so on.

For example, if you resist arrest, the underlying charge may get dropped for lack of evidence but the resisting arrest charges may remain. Though, the resisting arrest charges (or obstruction charges) may get dropped too depending on the prosecuting agency's policies.

It depends on the police order.

Order someone to step to the side for public safety? Probably alright. Probably. Unless it's obvious that what they really mean is "Step so you can't see what I'm about to do."

Order someone to stop filming? Spot-check your First Amendment training and get back to me. Or give that order again, on camera.

Breaking the law like filming police violence for example:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/05/29/minneapolis-protest...

Watch the video and tell me how that arrest was justified.

What was the person filming arrested for? I know many in Seattle were arrested for violating curfews or dispersal orders, and proceeded to claim that they were arrested for filming. They weren't arrested for filming, they were arrested because they harbored ill-conceived views that declaring oneself a journalist exempted them from curfews and orders to disperse and proceeded to violate them.

> Jimenez could be seen holding his CNN badge while reporting, identifying himself as a reporter, and telling the officers the crew would move wherever officers needed them to. An officer gripped his arm as Jimenez talked, then put him in handcuffs.

> Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-arres...

If you can simply not imagine the police arresting someone for no reason, or for challenging their unlawful assertion of authority, or so they can beat up protesters more effectively away from the watchful eyes of the press, no amount of evidence is going to convince you otherwise. But please, consider that police misbehaviour is at the very least a possibility.

> Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network.

Right, they were violating an order to disperse or a curfew. Again, being a journalist doesn't bestow some special rights that lets you ignore the police when they issue an order to disperse or set a curfew. When people are looting and burning stuff down, the law has provisions to let the police say "this is out of hand, the only way we have to restore peace is to tell everyone to get out of the area". And when people ignore those orders they're violating the law and subject to arrest. And so are CNN's journalists. Being a journalist doesn't bestow any special rights.

You can disagree with whether it was appropriate to order people disperse in this situation. But what is certain is that your previous comment was spreading falsehood: they weren't arrested for filming police, they were arrested for ignoring an order to disperse or a curfew. I'd come off as a lot less deceptive if you were transparent about the real reason for the arrest in your previous comment. It's 40 minutes old at the time of my writing this so you have at least an hour to edit it.

Why are you ready to take police's words at face value, while completely dismissing the hard video evidence that directly contradicts it? This is giving me serious 1984 vibes.

This thread seems to be triggering rate limiting:

What "hard evidence" contradicts it? Can you provide evidence that no such dispersal order was given? Or that they were arrested prior to such order, or curfew?

In fact the source you posted doesn't even claim that they were arrested for filming. This idea that the reporter was arrested for filming seems to be entirely your own.

Your question isn't, "Why am I ready to take police's words at face value?" The question you're really asking is "why aren't I ready to take an anonymous internet commenter's claims at face value?"

The video is the evidence. If you don't accept it as evidence, perhaps the fact that the governor of Minnesota apologized for it should hint that the arrest was not justified. If you don't consider any evidence, except police's words, to be evidence, I have nothing to add.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/tim-walz-apology-oma...

Nowhere in the interview you linked to did the Minnesota governor say that the journalist was arrested for filming, either.

The CNN journalist was far from the only person arrested. If the cops were arresting people for filming, not for violating dispersal orders, why were so many other people in the area who weren't filming being arrested? Why do you insist on claiming that they were arrested for filming, when CNN's own article doesn't make this claim?

There was no causal link between filming and this man's arrest. The police ordered a crowd to disperse, and the crowd didn't. Members of the crowd did not disperse, and were arrested. A journalist was among said members that did not disperse and were arrested. He would have been arrested whether or not he was filming.

The debate is whether the arrest was lawful or unlawful. What unlawful purpose did the police had in mind when they arrested the journalists is of very little effect and does not warrant a discussion. If you want to prove the arrest was lawful, bring on evidence. For example, that the journalist was charged and convicted of a crime in relation to the arrest made here later. If there are no charges and convictions, and I cannot emphasize it enough because you seem to ignore it no matter how many times I say it, the video strongly suggests and I daresay even proves the arrest was made for not legitimate reason, and the governor apologized for it, I cannot see how you can argue in good faith that the arrest was lawful.

> What unlawful purpose did the police had in mind when they arrested the journalists is of very little effect and does not warrant a discussion.

Then please edit the comment to which I originally responded to correctly state that they were arrested for violating an order to disperse.

If it's of such little effect then surely you would be fine with making this modest change, correct?

Yes, well, of course, indubitably, those pesky activists with press passes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pti6ZiH7dQ

The age old crime of filming crime.

This argument would be valid if the arrested journalists were in fact breaking the law, but it's not the case - the vast majority of the arrests ended up with prosecutors declining to press charges as the detainees were not breaking any laws. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/protests-lawsuits-arre... has some overview, of course the actual pdf linked in the original article has more detail as well.

How many of the arrested journalists "stepped beyond" their duty?

It appears that the police harmed journalists during the journalists' regular course of duty: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/31/journa...

The implicit assumption here is that those journalists who got arrested did so because they broke the law, not because of misbehaviour on the part of the police.

There seems to be at least enough evidence of the plausibility of the latter that the assumption is far too strong to offer without evidence.

>What the YoY stonks increase on Americans shot by rubber bullets?

What is a YoY stonk

It is a year-over-year stock, as typed on r/wallstreetbets.

This interaction demonstrates the risk of taking Reddit slang out of its native context.

I assume YoY is the year over year increase. Stonk mystifies me too, maybe some typo?

Update: stonk=slang for bombardment, according to a quick google.

stonk = stock in memespeak

stonks = stocks in internet slang. Mostly via r/wallstreetbets

"YoY" is "year over year" in finance terms, it just some comparison of data from one year to data from the previous year.

"Stonks" is an intentional misspelling of "stocks" which is a meme word used humorously (like "pwn") and it implies that the speaker doesn't understand financial markets

Why would you assume that cops are racist? Especially when a lot of them are black themselves?

This comment is much more inflammatory than it needs to be.

What do you mean? Parent comment was inflammatory by slandering anyone who works in an entire profession with no basis. Asking him why is not inflammatory.

Because we have looked at the statistics.

Which statistics?

Which statistics are these, please provide! They must be both very detailed and very massaged to get a result as generic as "cops are racist" (a mindset that requires significantly more information than provided by mere statistics to identify).

Here's one pretty interesting result: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200507094621.h...

> The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when "a veil of darkness" masks their race.

> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day -- around 7 p.m. -- when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.

whenever this comes up, this is inevitably the response, which sometimes betrays confirmation bias. these statistics are not hard to find.

This is worth a read for a nuanced, holistic look at the stats.

https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/

Lol, from that very article:

> Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

> Cops were…

> 17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

> 18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

> 16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

> 18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

> 25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

> 19 percent more likely to draw their guns

> 24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

Some people seem to physically resist arrest more than others. That's really not a smart thing to do, and leads to related stats like that.

If you're so keen on implying it, wouldn't it be more honest to phrase your sentence accurately?

> Black people seem to physically resist arrest more than others. That's really not a smart thing to do, and leads to related stats like that.

For what it’s worth to anyone who finds themselves reading this for whatever reason; the author of the above comment changed their original post from a snarky “have you?” To its current form after my reply.

In my opinion that is not the behavior of someone who is trying to have a good faith discussion.

PNAS has also looked at the statistics:

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877

Police brutality is definitely a problem in the United States, but it appears to be entirely colorblind.

"This article has a Correction, but has also been retracted and Letters."

From that retraction:

> Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.

edit: It's also, IMO, misleading to claim "PNAS has also looked at the statistics" based on their publication of a submitted article. It passed peer-review and they saw fit to publish it; it doesn't mean the National Academy of Sciences feels it's the last or only word on the subject.

The error is pretty trivial:

>“Although we were clear about the quantity we estimated and provide justification for calculating Pr(race|shot, X) in our report (see also 2, 3), we want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.’ This sentence refers to estimating Pr(shot|race, X). As we estimated Pr(race|shot, X), this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ This is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text.

The retraction comes after the correction, and again, states explicitly:

> our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements

This sounds exactly like a common complaint about academic self-censorship, in which academics are terrified about saying anything that might contradict the politically correct consensus.

Barring any odd discrepancies with the data, it it seems clear to me here at least. White officers and non-white officers don't seem to shoot blacks and hispanics at different rates. Hiding behind "does not speak of these issues" seems like a cop out when the conclusion slaps you in the face.

Evidently you either have not, or you have made some fairly basic errors in interpreting the data.

I took it to mean that the "cop's boys club" is racist, not all cops.

But if you want to see real world examples of racism in policing, talk to a handful of Black men and ask about their experiences dealing with the cops. You will very likely hear many stories that you have never heard of happening to white people.

And the individual cops don't have to be racist for the -system- of policing to be racist.

That’s backwards. The “system” quite obviously has no racial element. It’s possible (but uncommon) for racist individuals to get jobs as officers, but absolutely nothing about “the system” itself is racist.

Of course systems can have a racial element. How could a system that originated to catch runaway slaves -not- have a racial element?

Because systems are designed by individuals. If you put a bunch of not-racist police officers patrolling the Black part of town all day, guess what? They are going to arrest more Black people than white people even if white people are committing just as many crimes.

If your system has "stop and frisk" laws, then you are going to be stopping and frisking people who are walking and ignoring most everyone else that drives or takes a taxi (i.e. people with money and white, on average).

If your system rewards citations and arrests, then cops are going to tend towards neighborhoods where they can find more people out and about, i.e. urban centers, where people of color live and population is more dense. You aren't going to get many citations in the white suburbs where everyone gets in their cars to go anywhere and the population is all spread out.

There's a strong argument to be made for police accountability and conduct. But this post seems to complete ignore the actions of demonstrators and the journalists (often self-proclaimed and self-employed) embedded within them. Look at the disparity between Portland and Minneapolis with respect to the rest of the country: New York has 20 times the population yet only half the journalist arrests. Portland has the same number of journalist arrests and New York but only 1/12th the population. These are order-of-magnitude differences, in cities that happened to have widespread rioting.

And from a more firsthand perspective, I can say that in my hometown of the Seattle metro I never had witnessed the same level of chaos. Armed demonstrators cordoned off a several blocks of the city and declared it off limits to police, and successfully did so for almost a month. Thus is something I have never witnessed before. Nor have I ever witnessed widespread looting outside of Seattle. I live in Bellevue and stores across the street from single family homes were being looted. I saw people walking out of Bellevue Square mall with stolen stuff in broad daylight as though it was completely normal. Neither of these were things I witnessed during the Michael Brown protests or other demonstrations against police conduct.

Both the data and my lived experiences indicate a correlation between more extreme behavior among protestors and more arrests. If we could point to demonstrable differences in the criteria police use for arrests you may have a point. But presently I see little reason to conclude that the disparity in arrests in 2020 are due to policing changes rather than the behavior of demonstrators.

I don't have any memory in my lifetime of a credentialed CNN reporter being arrested live on air in front of his camera crew on US soil until this year.

I think it is rare that the singular instance of misbehavior is caught on live video feed.

I would have to assume that there were many, many similar cases that weren't captured on live cable news.

> Both the data and my lived experiences indicate a correlation between more extreme behavior among protestors and more arrests.

I think there's a false attribution of 'extreme behavior' with 'protestors' primarily. feel there are a significant number of people who took advantage of the protests to loot and burn and generally cause chaos. It's worth noting that Seattle and Portland, are primarily Caucasian (67% taken from OPCD), (77% taken from US Census Data) respectively. I think the looting can be more attributed to a general anarchy/countercultural movement in the PNW as opposed to protestors regarding BLM. It's definitely something that is more complex and requires more research than an off-the-cuff comment could generate.

This thread seems to be triggering rate limiting.

I'm sure plenty of people protested peacefully. But how is that relevant? Regardless of the extent of the overlap between people protesting and people rioting, an increase of the latter is bound to lead to more arrests even if the police's thresholds for making an arrest remain exactly the same.

The fact that there were more looters and rioters in the Pacific Northwest because of "general anarchy" is supportive of my claim, if anything: There were more arrests in Portland not because police became more oppressive, it was because there were more looters and rioters.

I think this comment is dangerous as it legitimises the (clearly documented) widespread arrests of openly marked journalists behaving entirely non aggressively, almost surely because they were pointing cameras at police officers behaving violently. Whether or not you think that the police violence was justified (disclaimer: I don't, at all. I think the psuedo military tactics US police demonstrated were the opposite of sensible de escalation strategy) I'd be surprised if you think that police should have the power to decide whether or not they are filmed.

> I think this comment is dangerous as it legitimises the (clearly documented) widespread arrests of openly marked journalists behaving entirely non aggressively, almost surely because they were pointing cameras at police officers behaving violently.

I have yet to see an instance of journalists being arrested for filming.

What I have seen are crowds of people refusing to abide by curfews or dispersal orders and getting arrested - journalists are sometimes among them. Each time I see a video of a journalist supposedly being arrested for filming, I also see a bunch of people in the background who aren't filming also being arrested.

Anyone can don a jersey that says "press, or a lanyard claiming to be a journalist. The more widespread the notion that these things somehow exempt people from curfews and orders to disperse, the less surprised I am that so many journalists (most of them independent) are getting arrested.

So because you witnessed a riot for the first time, and it wasn't in one of THOSE neighborhoods, we should ignore these statistics and assume there is no problem with police arresting journalists at an elevated rate?

We literally saw a CNN news crew arrested live on air, something completely unprecedented.

The majority of BLM protests have been peaceful[0].

I'll just come out and say it: You are not arguing in good faith. You have 0 interest in considering the merits of the police accountability movement. You trying to discredit the movement by pointing to the minority of opportunists who have sprung up.

0: https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/

This thread is triggering rate limiting:

> I'll just come out and say it: You are not arguing in good faith. You have 0 interest in considering the merits of the police accountability movement. You trying to discredit the movement by pointing to the minority of opportunists who have sprung up.

No, the people who protest in a productive and lawful manner I genuinely support. They are the victims of opportunists who riot, and make it so that the former cannot peacefully assemble. When a protest turns into a riot, and a curfew or dispersal order is issued it is the opportunists and rioters who deprived the legitimate protestors of their opportunity to speak. That is part of why it's so important to detain and charge rioters: it's not just the direct harm of violence, it's also the indirect harm of inhibiting peaceful demonstration.

But back to the original point, referencing a sharp increase in arrests while ignoring a sharp increase in riots is just willful ignorance. That's really what it is. What were the biggest riots we had in 2019? In 2018? Were they even remotely as big as the summer 2020 riots?

Same thing in Portland. These are anarchist criminals who should not be tolerated, not protesters. And fake press creds are a running joke.

At 11:30p.m., some individuals lit two fires on the north side of the building, including the awning over the main entrance. Again, warnings were issued via loudspeaker that the incident was a riot and that all persons must leave immediately to the south and east, and if they did not they were subject to arrest, citation, and the use of crowd control munitions including, but not limited to, tear gas and impact weapons. Officers had to quickly move in to put out the fires before they could spread. More arrests were made. During at least one arrest, officers had a crowd surround them and hit them with umbrellas and other objects. They were able to pull an arrested individual away.

As officers tried to disengage again, people with "press" printed on their outer clothing were seen throwing rocks at them. A rock struck the windshield of their transport vehicle, cracking the glass (photo).

> I think this narrowly focuses on transgressions against journos.

While the police are (in theory) subject to the same laws as everyone else that ban assault and battery, they are approximately never enforced against cops, and the US constitution doesn't say anything specifically about the right to not get beat up by the police (although that right certainly exists).

It does say that there are to be no laws abridging the freedom of the press. Additionally, press freedoms are really important, as a properly functioning free press allows people who might not get beat up by the police access to the knowledge that the police are breaking the law and beating people. People don't seem to like it when authority figures act hypocritically, so this is a great tool for exposing their crimes and perhaps causing something to be done about it.

From a consequentialist point of view, it's worse when the police beat journalists than people who aren't documenting cop crimes, because preventing press from publishing about criminal behavior by police increases the likelihood that they will go unpunished.

If we have limited resources to fight them, we should protect those who can accomplish the most in fighting this longstanding police culture of violence, racism, and lies by exposing it for the shameful, dishonorable practice that it is.

In some protests, when things get violent, is it easy to spot a journalist or do they just look like other protestors? honest question.

Usually they're pretty easy to spot by the microphone they carry, the docile behavior, sometimes an official nametag/badge/card, and the loudly announced "I'm a journalist"

But the police have even been arresting people who show all those signs

Many are clearly journalists, e.g. Omar Jimenez, the CNN reporter who was arrested on live TV along with his camera crew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftLzQefpBvM

journalists and other reporting figures usually have a lanyard saying "Press" I believe? totally anecdotal, but I've seen more than few instances of police brutalizing press members like other protesters unfortunately. I think such press members are easily identifiable, the police just don't care

> totally anecdotal, but I've seen more than few instances of police brutalizing press members like other protesters unfortunately.

This is one of those situations where the opposite would be even worse: if the police were roughing up protesters just for being in the wrong place, but leaving journalists alone to keep them onside...

It is conventional in non-oppressive societies for police to only arrest the people who are actually being violent or destroying property.

Police arresting people at protests who aren't being violent, including journalists, merely for being in proximity to those who are violent or for sharing similar political objectives is a warning sign that a society is becoming oppressive.

As far as journalists are concerned, they feel they were specifically targeted because they were journalists. A search [1] pulls up several examples of these claims. Some of the photos make it pretty hard to give police the benefit of the doubt (as far as whether journalists and protesters are hard to tell apart).

Even still, what we have is a situation where people were attacked and permanently injured by police. For example, Linda Tirado was permanently blinded in her left eye from police shooting a less lethal foam bullet. A photo of the officer aiming at her [2] leaves little doubt that he intended to shoot her.

In my mind, that leaves two possibilities: journalists were regularly physically attacking police officers, or police officers— unprovoked— attacked and maimed journalists covering the situation. Neither of these should be true in any capacity.

This is, of course, to step over the other oft-repeated claims by protesters that police were responsible for most of the violence. Given that the protests were largely due to police violence, this doesn't paint the situation in a better light.

[1] Setting region to US may return better results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=protest+police+targeted+journalist... [2] https://www.startribune.com/photographer-sues-says-officers-...

It's part of a self-proclaimed journalist's pitch in a scenario like that, honestly. "I am a real journalist, and the proof is that they tried to arrest me."

In some of the higher case arrests, it was very clear that the person was a journalist. Protestors don't usually carry expensive camera gear and wear "PRESS" vests. Police don't care though, they've beat and maced journalists in front of other press.

It absolutely does NOT matter if someone is identified as press or not. If a protest is declared an unlawful assembly and people are ordered to disperse then journalists must obey the orders given by police too. They do not have special privileges that exempt them from following lawful orders by police.

a free, professional, and trustworthy press is vital for any functioning democracy. through all the rightful and wrongful critiques people have given the press over the past 5 years, I wish more people would understand this

I unfortunately think that the US is trending towards the likes of countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia and how they handle their press

> I unfortunately think that the US is trending towards the likes of countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia and how they handle their press

We just had 4 years of every major media outlet (besides Fox) raking the president of the country over the coals 24/7... I think we still have a long way to go before we are like Turkey or Russia (how often do you see criticism of Putin or Erdogan in their respective media?).

I could be wrong, but the wrinkle I see is that their raking him over the coals is perceived to be in pursuit of their own political goals, not in pursuit of the truth. Their criticisms were trivial (as an extreme example, Melania's performance redesigning the rose garden). Arguably, stories of substance such as police violence were actively suppressed by the state through intimidation.

I largely agree, but this isn't a mono-dimensional topic. The press could remain free in trivial matters while becoming more controlled in matters relevant to governmental accountability.

> "stories of substance such as police violence were actively suppressed by the state through intimidation."

Maybe we're thinking of different events, but there was a tremendous amount of news coverage about police violence this past year.

Yes, despite how the police treated journalists.

I am not a journalist, so I do not know how they respond to this pressure first-hand. I suspect, though, that there is a silencing effect when it's easier, safer, and less costly to report on celebrity gossip and easily-obtainable police reports than things the police prefer they don't report on.

My point is, I suppose, that the media can appear fully engaged and "busy" without generating any of the "fourth estate" corrective pressure that is so vital for a healthy society. We may never know what was not reported on.

Well, you're not wrong.

Going to OP's statement of >a free, professional, and trustworthy press is vital for any functioning democracy. through all the rightful and wrongful critiques people have given the press over the past 5 years, I wish more people would understand this

It's hard to consider the American press either professional or trustworthy now.

This is egregious, but nothing new. Obama was not a friend to journalist either:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversatio...

This sort of unthinking, reflexive cynical glibness encourages the public indifference that allows things like this to happen:

> The numbers are staggering. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019.

This is in fact new.

Even as someone who is generally sympathetic to reports like this I don't think 2019 is a useful comparison. What are the numbers compared to other years with mass protests and/or riots (ex. 2016)? Is this a number that scales with the number and size of large events or was 2020 truly an outlier regardless?

The blurred lines between vlogger / live-tweeter and protest participant are responsible for a lot of this.

Police have arrested journalists and camera crews before... but they generally avoid this because of the terrible optics, and there's a pretty firm line between "observing the protest" and "egging on the protest".

But if an independent journalist now doesn't need a team, just a cell phone and a twitter account, I think it's very easy for (1) far, far more people to self-identify as journalists, and (2) the police to not believe or care about the distinction between casual tweeter and casual journalist.

A record number of US journalists fail to support Assange or call for his release. The Bonhoffer quote is appropriate.

Anyone with an iphone and a youtube account is now a “journalist” and frankly theyre not far off in credibility from corporate. Thats where the bar is at. So the datapoints have shifted

That's not the definition being used here:

> “While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.“

So people that have been uploading to youtube for multiple days?

FTA: “While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.“

How does the number of journalists compare to previous years? How does this compare with other years that featured similar amounts of public protesting and social unrest? How long were journalists kept in custody?

The number of arrests is certainly concerning, but I think there is a lot to consider with 2020 and that statistic alone isn't enough for me to conclude we are sliding into an authoritarian police state. It's definitely something that should be investigated further, though.

What's their definition of journalist here? Journalists, at these protests, that were arrested?

In other words, how many twitter followers do I need before I can identify as a journalist?!

I wonder if there's any countries that specifically recognise people as journalists?

Like how police officers have a warrant and specific powers and accountability, could legitimate journalists be recognised, empowered and held accountable like that? Then it could also be an offence to impersonate them.

Otherwise yeah a journalist is just some random person claiming to be a journalist and I'm not sure what could be done about that?

Among the professional journalists I've known (quite a few since I went to journalism school and worked in a newsroom for four years), licensing has been universally seen as a Bad Idea. The reason being that this gives the licensing authority power to decide who deserves to be recognized as a credible journalist, which is one very small step away from power over deciding right/wrong-think, which is antithetical to the point of journalism.

Perhaps a compromise is to identify a journalist by the news network they're associated with.

The Supreme Court of Canada in 2009 specifically recognized a defence related to defamation as being one that's broader than "journalists" in the sense of employed people who work for the news media, and here's their explanation:

"In arguments before us, the defence was referred to as the responsible journalism test. This has the value of capturing the essence of the defence in succinct style. However, the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists. These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets. I agree with Lord Hoffmann that the new defence is “available to anyone who publishes material of public interest in any medium”"

Decision: https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/7837/index...

This explanation is an answer to the question of who's a "legitimate journalist", which is that it should be about what people are doing not who they work for. That's an idea captured in the above case, which reviews some of the laws of other countries on this subject too. It was in the context of defamation, but it's closely linked to your comments about accountability (since the everyday threat is lawsuits, not assault/arrest).

> I wonder if there's any countries that specifically recognise people as journalists?

There are, and it usually is a bad thing. Making it "official" is an easy way to gatekeep speech rights.

Let's not pretend that it just happened to smaller-audience journalists. There's videos of CNN reporters being arrested while on air.

If I was arrested while livestreaming to Facebook I would be on their list of arrested journalists.

Technically this means that a journalist was arrested in this situation, by their definition above: https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/us/chicago-facebook-live-beat...

So? It's still an attack on the 1st amendment. During the protests I was watching an aggregation of different livestreams on Twitch, many of them were streams on Facebook. Some of the journalists doing reporting on there likely only had a handful of viewers when they started getting streamed by the aggregator and then they had thousands of viewers.

These types of journalists caught many of the instances of police brutality that happened during the protests and got video of things like the burning down of the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis.

What I'm hearing is that if I live stream myself performing a crime, and I'm arrested, I'm now a valid statistic for a journalist being arrested.

Is that accurate? I strongly disagree with you, if so.

This is such a strawman. I doubt you can find evidence of any of the arrested journalists actually getting convicted of a crime from their arrest, let alone a large percentage.

There's a difference between not getting prosecuted due to a lack of political will (i.e. in Seattle or Portland), and being innocent.

So you're conflating two things here

If people are actively engaged in protest (e.g. carrying signs), I agree they are not "journalists."

However, having viewers or not is irrelevant.

Also, let's not pretend even credentialed journalists weren't assaulted and arrested by police.

The faq you listed says they would not count you in that case

Are you saying all the people in question were simultaneously committing crimes?

Because otherwise your analogy makes no sense. Since, you know, you said you would be committing a crime.

The real question is, is this an honest question - are you really asking what other people think, or, are you deliberately implying all the folks in question were somehow criminal?

No, you wouldn't. From the section you quoted above:

"only cover individuals who self-identify"

We can self-identify as anything, man. “If you will it, it is no dream.” and all that jazz. (Theodor Herzl)

Now read the rest of the sentence. You supplied it once, and have had multiple opportunities to read it. Here, I'll give you another one:

"...this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.“

Your mind seems to be made up, based on your comments here, but I supply the context for others.

From their FAQ:

Why doesn't the site include data from before 2017? We do not feel that data collected retroactively would meet our rigorous research standards. We believe that data collected before we established a tracking system, methodology, and outreach is likely to be less comprehensive and therefore likely to underestimate the number of incidents before 2017.

So it's a record number of journalists arrested since... 2017?!

And finally, the definition of journalist:

Who does the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker count as a journalist? The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker adopts a functional definition of who is a journalist. It doesn’t matter whether the individual has a press pass or went to journalism school, whether they work for The New York Times or work for themselves. What matters is whether the person was performing an act of journalism. The Tracker will count journalists whose rights to gather and disseminate information were violated in the course of their work or as a result of their work.

In the case of border stops, the resistance of U.S. authorities to provide information makes it extremely difficult to identify whether a journalist has been stopped because of their work. So although it is possible that some journalists may be stopped for other reasons, we will report cases of all journalists who are stopped at the border and questioned for a certain amount of time.

A journalist who attends a protest in order to protest publicly, rather than to document the protest, and is arrested or attacked in that capacity will not be counted on the site. While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.

In summary: this is a meaningless article.

Don't know about their definition for this article, but the US Constitution doesn't define credentials required to exercise freedom of the press. Everyone in America gets that right. Literally anyone can be a journalist by acting as one, even if they don't have an audience.

Does it actually matter?

If you believe it does, why?

This seems like the exact use case for an ILO. An Initial Legal Offering I was reading about that will now be easier for defendants to access.

The linked service allows you to use the blockchain to stake your currency against the legal proceeding benefitting in the outcome if successful.

https://www.institutionalassetmanager.co.uk/2020/12/15/29354...

If this is just by volume, the number of arrests in PDX has to be astronomical. These kids were getting arrested every night. Mike Schmidt is running a real tag and release operation.

A protester holds a camera and he becomes a “journalist”. He gets arrested for smashing windows, and he’s “an arrested journalist”.

>The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests

So I'm guessing that most of these are various civil unrest (curfew violations, trespassing, etc) type arrests?

I would assume these are situations where they're minor charges / charges dropped type of situations?

Not to justify whatever given arrest(s) happened, but that seems different than say an arrest intended to prevent a story being told, shutdown a newspaper, or etc.

Are there more "journalists" ? I.e., people who post on the internet or have blogs?

A couple of comments, it's pretty funny to say this site tends conservative when all the heavy downvoted comments are all conservatives. HN and /. "used" to be, not right wing, but libertarian, but since the escalation of the woke brigade most people have been silenced, it is not useful to lose your job over some comments. Btw, weird that the crazy story about the new McCarthy-style list of the NVIDIA researcher has not reached the site (or I havent seen it more probably).

The other thing to have in mind is that this exaggerated dynamic not only happens in the US. So everytime you read something like "500!!!! journalists detained" in China/Mexico/Uzbekistan, 10% are actual journalists, and 90% are people who was in the protests filming claiming they were filming with their phones. Far from me to defend an authoritarian regime, I mention this because it seems is a blind-spot many Americans have. The same exaggerations made by the media in America (the result of a polarized society) usually happen elsewhere too

Someone better tell Glenn Greenwald, I don't think he got the memo.

All you need to do is write "press" in sharpie somewhere visible on your person and upload cell phone videos to youtube, twitch, dlive, etc. to be considered a "journalist" in 2020. Maybe set up a venmo/cashapp account. That's what the vast majority of live streamers in Portland do covering the riots, and most who were arrested were breaking the law. There are many more "livestreamers" than accredited journalists who work for actual newspapers, magazines and tv news stations.

It would be interesting to know how many people working for actual "major publications" were arrested vs self proclaimed "journalists" streaming or uploading to youtube. I witnessed many, many livestreamers being arrested over the last 7 months of ongoing riots/unlawful assemblies. I don't think I ever saw anybody from the local news stations/news papers being arrested.

The livestreamers who were arrested were violating the law.

1) participating in de-arresting someone (when the police are physically detaining someone, others will physically attack the police to set the person being arrested "free")

2) throwing objects at police

3) Not leaving the scene of a declared riot/unlawful assembly when lawfully told to do so. They are usually warned multiple times through the LRAD system with at least 15-30 minutes forewarning.

Most arrested were actually actively participating in the riots and not just passively recording/reporting. They also routinely purposefully turn their cameras away when people who they are favorable towards are committing crimes so there is no evidence and chant "what did you see? We didn't see shit" over and over.

Journalist Andy Ngo (https://twitter.com/mrandyngo) routinely posts their arrest records and what the arrest charges were, and often video of what they did when arrested. Most charges are dropped by the local DA. Most are also immediately bailed out if actually charged using a $1.4M bail fund (https://www.gofundme.com/f/pdx-protest-bail-fund and that's only 1 fund of several) set up by the National Lawyers Guild. Basically they'll only actually charge you if you committed arson. They even drop charges of physically attacking police officers unless it's particularly egregious and well documented.

As you can probably tell, I strongly disagree on who they are claiming are journalists. I don't think anyone from KOIN/KGW/Fox/The Oregonian/New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time or any other major publications were arrested in Portland during the riots. They tend to be lawful while gathering their source material.

"Journalist Andy Ngo"

That's a good one, you mean the man who constantly steals the work of other journalists and pass it off as his own? The same 'journalist' who passed on kill lists of protesters' names to neo-nazi groups [0]? You need better sources.

[0] https://emilygorcenski.com/post/andy-ngo-and-the-atomwaffen-...

I was just going to say something similar. His stories are also to the point of being fabricated. Remember the "concrete milkshakes"?

He also posts parts of video clips that make conservatives look like the victims, but when you find the full clip you'll see they were the ones starting a fight.

You might want to look into "fair use" laws...that's not "stealing." If he was stealing them, why aren't they suing him over it? They're just very nice?

The point I was making with Andy Ngo is he publishes the public arrest records so you can plainly see what they were actually arrested/charged with. In fact, they are just the official images of the records released by the police.

So, what makes these "kill lists?" The person reading them? Lists of public arrest records are considered "kill lists?"

Nice Antifa activist you link to. And you say I need better sources? I'm talking about public records, not opinion.

What's your bar for being a journalist? Andy Ngo is one of those guys who goes out with his cell phone and records stuff and you seem to think he qualifies. Is it just agreeing with you politically?

Andy Ngo doesn't throw rocks or participate in other "riot-esque" actions.

Yes he does. https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3apyv/super-awkward-for-rig...

Rookie numbers

Since more people are LARPing as journalists than ever before this doesn't surprise me.

I'm skeptical about this. Are we talking actual journalists, or "journalists" like people carrying smartphone cameras on the street during a riot?

Tough titties.

When the "real" journalists won't stand up for "non-real" journalists like Assange, they have to expect the same treatment will be meted out to them also.

That's also true, sadly, but: if they all get the Assange treatment tough, who's gonna remain writing articles? The regime-backed, state-obeying writers.

Some useful tools for journalists at risk to help manage their digital and physical security:

Surveillance Self Defence (mostly digital security, strong US material in particular) https://ssd.eff.org/en

Security in a Box (mostly digital security) https://securityinabox.org/en/

Umbrella App (built by my team) on iOS, Android (a mix of everything from digital to physical surveillance, protest, kidnap etc.) https://secfirst.org/umbrella/ or web (Beta) https://umbrella.secfirst.org

I see some folks (and many journalists) astounded that folks wearing press badges and press helmets were arrested, which I believe to be a dangerous viewpoint. We don't want journalists to get special treatment for the same reason that we don't want politicians or judges to get special treatment and also for the same reason we dogfood our systems. Journalists need to have a representative experience in order to be able to report well.

If the populace loses some right, it's not enough to just restore it for just a select few.

First, the press credentials should probably grant some benefit of the doubt if the justification for arrests is something along the lines of, "I can't think of any reason you might be here except to cause mischief."

I think what's shocking to people is that, traditionally, police have understood that they're somewhat more likely to be held accountable for abuses of power toward journalists. It seems likely that is primarily for the same reason that e.g. a tech company with a bad policy is more incentivized to fix it if it happens to stub the toe of anyone with an audience.

That police in many cases apparently knew that there would be no consequences if the press was _strongly_ encouraged to document frequent abuses is not a great sign.

The other parallel I think folks are drawing is that abuses of journalists in particular is a common feature of dictatorships. My sense is that this is not a particularly good parallel to draw in this case, but it's easy to see how one might connect the dots based on a passing review of the facts.

> ... traditionally, police have understood that they're somewhat more likely to be held accountable for abuses of power toward journalists. It seems likely that is primarily for the same reason that e.g. a tech company with a bad policy is more incentivized to fix it if it happens to stub the toe of anyone with an audience.

That's exactly what I see as problematic with it. When the only way to get google to fix something is by having an audience, that's really bad. When the only way to get society to fix something is by having an audience, that's really bad too.

There's an analogy to product reviewers. If the chef gives something different to the reviewer than they give to everyone else, the review isn't useful or is even misleading. When something happens to reviewers or journalists, it makes front page headlines. Until then, it just happens more quietly, which is dangerous. I'm just tired of the media not making a stink about important things until it happens to them, then suddenly this things is Import and and it Must Change Now.

> The other parallel I think folks are drawing is that abuses of journalists in particular is a common feature of dictatorships.

Totally agreed. I don't think we should withdraw protections from journalists. We need everyone to get the protection to see what's happening with their own eyes, talk about it, and post about it.

>When the only way to get society to fix something is by having an audience, that's really bad too.

That's just politics, i.e. how the world has always worked? Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that.

Right, exactly. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so we need to make sure that wheel squeaks are representative of society's ills. When something bad happens to non-journalists, journalists need to squeak just as loud as if it were happening to themselves. Providing the same treatment to the media as everyone else is one way to encourage it.

I agree with your point, I just think it's inherent people will care more about other people they're regularly in contact with. Reporters' friends are other reporters by and large, just like my friends are largely other tech folks.

I'm not arguing that it's good that police are more likely to handle situations with reporters well. I am saying that the fact that they won't even be on their best behavior in their interactions with the press anymore is indicative of the fact that they no longer think it's necessary to do so.

That strikes me as noteworthy.

> The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter.

So basically, it's not a coincidence - police are more likely to arrest journalists that are attending anti-police protests. And it's sort of understandable. Imagine you are a police officer called to go to a protest where everyone there hates your guts, calls for you to lose your job, and bad actors instigate confrontation, throw stuff at you, etc. The escalated tensions probably adds way more stress to the officers there and they snap and start doing heavy handed policing because they want the protest to be over so they can go home.

They don't get to snap.

This. The last thing that anyone should want to hear is that the police are snapping under high-pressure situations, which are the situations where the average citizen is going to need them the most level-headed.

Was anyone suggesting it was a coincidence? It makes sense more journalists were arrested, but it's still notable.

It’s also not like they have press cards in their hat or some press pass lanyard. They look like everyone else and are probably recording/photographing like everyone else. An arrest by itself doesn’t mean much in this context. But I assume they are released once they can be proven to be a journalist and no charges are brought.

That's not a particularly moving defense. There are no de jure rights afforded specifically to journalists (whatever your definition). And even if there were, the threat of arrest is still an intimidation tactic the police can use to subjugate civilians — journalist or not.

If you want to ignore the context I mentioned and make this a broad statement about policing in the US that’s fine but it’s also a completely different topic. Generally speaking, journalists are allowed to do their jobs and have a low risk of being arrested. They got caught up in the mix of the riots not dispersing as ordered, is my take. It’s not a trend or a bigger statement about the nations criminal justice system, no matter how flawed. This data shows nothing when context is applied.

Well I went into the article (based on the title) thinking police all over the nation were randomly deciding to arrest journalists more often. But this makes it clear that no, it's only journalists at anti-police protests getting arrested at elevated rates. This article could very well have been titled "Record Breaking Number of Anti-Police Protests in U.S. This Year"

It is understandable that the police want to arrest the press when the press is reporting on a movement against police brutality. Its still bad.

police don't nor should get to brutalize civilians just because they don't like being called out for the corruption and abuse of power rampant in their profession

I'm not saying it's right, just that it's understandable. To use a software analogy it would be like if for your job you were forced to help make a website for anti-software developers who hate you and your profession, and you are treated poorly while trying to do your job. That environment is not going to cultivate craftsmanship to say the least. The right thing to do is to dutifully and professionally execute your tasks, but in reality people have emotions and some software engineers in that position might sabotage the project out of spite.

Well "understandable" sounds dangerously close to acceptable. Because it's foreseeable departments need to be extra judicious in which officers they send into emotionally charged situations, officers lacking self-control are going to do the country more harm than good in protest situations.

Indeed. I think it's important to humanize the police officers and acknowledge that they are people with emotions too though. Protestors can get angry and smash/burn stuff, police can get angry and arrest people and disperse crowds. People are people, and this situation is particularly tricky because the opposing parties do not like each other. In an ideal world only the cream of the crop would be sent to police these protests, but I would wager most police departments are understaffed and have to make do.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seemed like anyone could go in there with a camera and "journalist" written onto their shirt and behave like they don't need to follow orders from the police.

Why are the Police giving anyone orders unless they're committing a crime?

Who said they weren't commit a crime? Many, if not most, were.

When they complain about journalists being arrested... I'm guessing they are implicitly limiting that to non-criminal journalists.

Police don't need to know of you're committing a crime, only think that you might be. It's up to the courts whether you did

If a cop thinks it's illegal to have your shoes untied, or to be jogging, they can arrest you

That's a circular argument.

Why are the police giving orders to people at all? If they think they're committing a crime, arrest them. Otherwise, leave them alone.

> The escalated tensions probably adds way more stress to the officers there and they snap and start doing heavy handed policing because they want the protest to be over so they can go home.

If they can’t manage the stress in a way that doesn’t prevent them from doing their job correctly they should be fired.

The same logic applies to you or I, what is so special about the police?

They have a strong union.

In that case, they should perhaps consider taking a job more commensurate with their abilities.

Policing is difficult. That's not an excuse for doing it badly. Anyone who can't do it properly should be retrained, fired, or in some of the cases which occurred recently, criminally prosecuted.

Unless you ramp up pay in order to get better talent, this is just a recipe to have understaffed police units.

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