Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway894345

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?

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