‘Meritless arrests’: Charges dropped against journalists covering DNC protest

Above, a snapshot of all incidents documented in the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker so far this year.

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Charges dropped against photojournalists arrested at DNC

Charges were finally dropped against photojournalists Josh Pacheco and Olga Fedorova, both of whom were arrested while covering a protest near the Democratic National Convention in Chicago earlier this year.

“None of us should have been charged or arrested in the first place, or forced to go through months of criminal proceedings,” Fedorova told the Tracker after the disorderly conduct charge was dropped on Nov. 14. “These meritless arrests and charges are against public interest and are a blatant violation of the First Amendment.”

Other notable updates and incidents

• The Louisville Metro Police Department announced Nov. 7 that it had cleared a Kentucky police officer who shot pepper balls at television journalists of most violations against him. The officer had fired at and injured WAVE journalists James Dobson and Kaitlin Rust while they were reporting live on air during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Louisville. Dobson told the Tracker that he was hospitalized for his injuries, which caused severe bruising, nerve damage in his left arm for six months and “lots of mental stress.” He said the pepper balls also filled his camera with capsaicin. Rust was struck in the leg, causing a welt and a bruise.

• On Nov. 8, the Department of Justice announced charges against three men it accused of surveilling and plotting to murder New York-based Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad. Thirteen others have been indicted in connection with murder-for-hire plots against Alinejad.
• On Nov. 15, the FBI arrested a man in South Carolina who was allegedly behind a series of hate-based threats against a reporter in New York’s Hudson Valley. According to the complaint, the man threatened to bomb the reporter’s home and to kill her and her family.

The final election-related accounting

Last month, just days before the general election, I walked us through historical election data in the Tracker and how to apply that information to understand the risks journalists face.

Relatively speaking, the period leading up to and after the election were without major incident for trackable aggressions against journalists. We documented zero assaults or arrests of journalists at election-related events in November. And that’s a good thing.

There were, however, plenty of accusations of wrongdoing against news outlets by candidates, notably from Donald Trump now President-elect. On Election Day, journalists from news organizations — Axios, Mother Jones, Puck and Voice of America among them — were denied credentials for Trump’s watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida. Two days prior, he had told supporters at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that he wouldn’t mind if a would-be assassin were to “shoot through” journalists in an attempt to kill him. Throughout the month of October, Trump threatened CBS with revoking its broadcast license after it aired an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. He then threatened to sue, and days later, did sue.

We captured one year’s worth of how candidates — from all parties — treated the press in the run-up to the general election. Find it all here: Politics and the Press: Tracking how the media is treated on the road to Election 2024