A Crucial New Site Tracks Attacks on Press in the US – WIRED

Police officers respond to a protest in Minnesota at which several student journalists were arrested, following the acquittal in June of former police officer Jeronimo Yanez in the shooting death of Philando Castile.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

You likely remember that, in May, then congressional candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter for The Guardian for asking too many questions. You may not have heard, though, that as part of Gianforte's ultimate settlement, Montana's newly elected representative made a $50,000 donation to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And now that money has been funneled directly into the US Press Freedom Tracker , a newly launched website that intends to document press freedom violations in a place that hasn't historically required it: the United States.

After finding out about Gianforte's unexpected donation, Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, called up the head of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Trevor Timm, to see if he'd be interested in using the money to underwrite the project. According to Simon , Timm "liked the irony" of using Gianforte's donation to help document violations like the one he'd just committed, and the US Press Freedom Tracker was born.

While Freedom of the Press Foundation takes care of the day-to-day operations of the site, 20 different press freedom groups help support its mission, including a steering committee headed up by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Groups like CPJ and Reporters Without Borders already work to catalog press freedom issues in other parts of the world , of course, but it usually takes a journalist being imprisoned or killed to register as a violation.

"That doesnt really work in the United States, where fortunately we have very few journalists who are actually imprisoned, and very few who are killed," says Peter Sterne, the site's senior reporter and managing editor. "What you do have in the US is a lot of journalists being arrested at protests . Increasingly you have journalists being stopped at the border. You have leak investigations into journalists sources, which really accelerated under the Obama administration and has continued under the Trump administration. You have seizures of journalists equipment and forced searches of their equipment. And increasingly you have physical attacks."

The site assembles these various press-freedom violations into neat categories that include "arrests of journalists," "equipment searches and seizures," "physical attacks on journalists," and "border stops of journalists." At the time of publication, the tracker has documented 19 arrests, 12 seizures, 11 attacks, and four border stops.

The broadness of the categories encompasses wide-ranging incidents. The physical attack category, for instance, includes items titled " Fox News host soaked with water at Brooklyn bar ," " Alaska state senator slaps journalist ," and " OC Weekly intern Frank Tristan attacked at pro-Trump rally ."

The US Press Freedom Tracker bases its numbers off of data collected from journalists' submissions, professional organizations, and other press-freedom groups. Those behind the project hope to use the information as a reference point in its work advocating for journalists' rights. But deciding what does and does not count as a violation isn't an exact science, and each category offers a detailed explanation of its methodology.

"There were a lot of questions that we had to consider. Like, if someone is detained but they are not actually charged, then is that considered an arrest? What if theyre kettled at a protest, does that count as a physical attack?" says Sterne, referring to the police practice of containing a crowd in a small area.

Sterne also emphasized that, while the group hopes the data will come in handy for legal briefs and other official uses, it serves an equally important role as public data that anyone can access. The groups paid special attention to ensuring that the site was easy to use and intuitive enough for the general public.

"I think is a great idea whose time, unfortunately, has come because of growing threats to press freedom in the United States,"says Leonard Downie, former executive editor of The Washington Post , who supervised the paper's Watergate coverage. "So it will certainly be useful to the news media as they share information about and combat these threats. What remains to be seen is whether it can also help educate the public."

While the United States is often held up as the epitome of the free press, Sterne emphasized that things here aren't ideal, and may even be getting worse. The problem, though, was that no one has had any of the data to back any of those conclusions up. Or, at least, they didn't until now.