At protests, police are increasingly arresting members of the press—especially those with cameras.
October 7, 2024 | Source: Monroe Gallery of Photography
Via Columbia Journalism Review
October 7, 2024
Since the violence of last October 7—as the conflict between Israel and Palestine has grown deadlier, and spread more widely in the Middle East—it has also been, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker, a nonpartisan database of press freedom violations, a “protest year.” The visual journalists who cover demonstrations across America—photographers, videographers—are at the center of the action. “We have to get creative, go on the floor, shoot through cops’ legs, just to get that visual,” Madison Swart—a photojournalist in New York whose work has been published in Out and Cosmopolitan, among other places—told me. In May, while covering a pro-Palestinian protest, Swart was briefly detained by police officers—one of forty-three journalists who have been arrested in the past year, triple the previous number. According to Stephanie Sugars, a reporter for the US Press Freedom Tracker, “it has felt that the predominant number of incidents, at least since the protests started, are against people who are documenting visually in some capacity.”