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Journalists Covering US Riots Attacked by Both Protestors and Police

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – There have been numerous reports of journalists suffering attacks from both protestors and police while covering US riots sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. According to Reuters, there have been some two dozen attacks on members of the press by police. Documenting some 60 cases of attacks, arrests, or harassment of journalists, Radio Television Digital News Association reported many of the recorded incidents were by protestors as well.

On Friday, a Fox News crew reporting outside the White House were surrounded, chased and pummeled by around a dozen rioters after being identified as working for the conservative channel. “It’s the most scared I’ve been since being caught in a mob that turned on us in Tahrir Square (in Cairo, Egypt),” Veteran report Leland Vittert said in an interview with Reuters on Sunday. Referring to a number of such incidents, the Hill’s Joe Concha told America’s Newsroom on Monday that the riots had become a “dangerous situation” for journalists.

On Friday evening, CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested on live television while covering a protest in Minneapolis. In Louisville Kentucky on Saturday, local TV reporter Kaitlin Rust and her crew were “peppered” with non-lethal bullets during a live broadcast. According to Reuters, Rust “screamed on air ‘I’m getting shot! I’m getting shot!’ as cameras caught her and her crew being targeted at gunpoint and shot at by local police with pepper balls.”

In Minneapolis on Saturday, photojournalist Linda Tirado lost an eye after being hit by a less-lethal projectile. Also in Minneapolis on Saturday, Reuters reports, footage taken by cameraman Julio-Cesar Chavez “showed an officer aiming directly at him as police fired rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse about 500 protesters in the southwest of the city shortly after the 8 p.m. curfew.” Following this incident, Reuters security advisor Rodney Seward had to be treated for a deep wound under his left eye after he was hit by a rubber bullet.

In response to attacks by police on the free press, an open letter was sent to police on June 1, endorsed by a number of groups including the Society of Professional Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. “These cities belong to all of us,” the letter read.” You must persuade your colleagues, commanders and chiefs, and the mayors and governors who direct them, to halt the deliberate and devastating targeting of journalists in the field.”