Bulletin: Fall 2011, Volume 17, Number 1

Occupy Wall Street Produces Legal and Ethical Issues for Journalists

On Sept. 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), an ongoing series of demonstrations, was born after the Canadian activist group Adbusters organized a protest in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Wall Street financial district. The protests include messages against social and economic inequality, high unemployment rates, “greed,” “corruption,” and the influence of corporations on government. The protesters’ slogan, “We are the 99%” refers to the growing economic disparity between the wealthiest one percent of the U.S. population and the rest of the citizenry. By October 9, the New York City OWS protests spread to more than 95 cities in 82 countries and more than 600 communities in the United States. OWS has raised First Amendment issues for protesters, and it has also led to the arrests of journalists covering the OWS protests as well as industry debates on the ethical issues involved in covering protests. In addition, potential trademark violations arose when local OWS groups used metropolitan newspaper flags as a basis for the designs of their own publications.

Journalists Arrested Covering OWS Protests Across the Country

Journalists have become part of the story of the OWS movement after several were arrested while reporting on protests across the country. In a November 30 Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) editorial, SPJ President John Ensslin identified an “alarming trend” of journalists being “arrested, detained or restricted from doing their jobs at various ‘Occupy’ demonstrations.” Arrested reporters have included those covering OWS for mainstream media outlets, freelance journalists, and student journalists. Arrests have occurred in cities including Atlanta; New York City; Oakland, Calif.; Rochester, N.Y.; Richmond, Va.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Milwaukee.

According to a November 15 Associated Press (AP) report, at least six journalists were arrested during the overnight police raid of OWS’s New York encampment in Zuccotti Park. Those not arrested were kept at a distance during the raid, the story said. Arrested journalists included AP reporter Karen Matthews and AP photographer Seth Wenig, who were taken into custody along with about eight other protestors who they had followed through an opening in a chain-link fence into a park, the story said. Others arrested included a New York Daily News reporter, a freelancer for National Public Radio (NPR), a blogger for The New York Times’ Local East Village, a Vanity Fair correspondent, and other freelancers. “I told them I was a reporter,” NPR freelancer Julie Walker told the AP. “I had my recorder on before [the police officer] ripped it out of my hand.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended New York Police Department’s (NYPD) policy of keeping journalists back from the scene, the AP reported. “The police department routinely keeps members of the press off to the side when they’re in the middle of police action. It’s to prevent the situation from getting worse and it’s to protect members of the press,” he told the AP. Journalists found the arrests troubling and the AP reported at least one city official has called for an investigation into the arrests. Deputy NYPD Inspector Kim Royster told the AP that the two AP journalists arrested, along with two other journalists, had unlawfully entered a private park and had cut the fence to get into the area. “The space was off limits. It was private property and there was signage that said no trespassing,” Royster told the AP. Gene Policinski criticized the “arrest ‘em now, sort ‘em out later” approach in dealing with demonstrators in an October 31 column for the First Amendment Center following the arrest of journalists along with OWS protesters in Nashville, Tenn. “Guiding principles in dealing with these issues are that government authorities are permitted to intrude on our First Amendment rights only in very narrow, well-defined circumstances and the only to the minimum degree necessary to achieve the desirable outcome of public safety,” he wrote. Making arrests in broad sweeps, Policinski added, “falls woefully short of these principles.”

Following the New York City arrests, news organizations sent letters to city officials on November 21 expressing concern over the police treatment of journalists covering the OWS protests and called for meetings to address the issue. “The police actions of last week have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory,” a coalition of news organizations and journalist groups said in the letter to Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, NYPD’s chief spokesman. The letter described reports of credentialed media being identified, segregated, and kept away from reporting on or photographing the police action being taken against OWS protesters. Journalists were also struck by police officers or intentionally impeded from doing their jobs, the letter said. A copy of the letter signed by coalition members can be viewed at http://www.nyclu.org/files/releases/DCPI%20Letter%20-%20Signed%2011-21-11.pdf. Numerous organizations including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also released statements expressing their concerns. “We are alarmed by New York law enforcement’s treatment of journalists covering the eviction of Occupy Wall Street today,” Carlos Lauría, CPJ senior coordinator for the Americas said in a statement. “Journalists must be allowed to cover news events without fear of arrest and harassment. It is particularly disturbing that government officials sought to block any coverage of the event at all.”

Josh Stearns, the associate program director at Free Press, a national nonprofit public interest organization, has taken on the project of documenting journalist arrests at OWS protests around the country, earning him national attention from organizations like journalism think tank The Poynter Institute. According to Stearns’ Storify website, 32 journalists have been arrested as of December 6, 10 of them occurred in New York City on November 15. Stearns describes his methods for tracking and verifying journalist arrests in a November 21 blog post. Providing accurate information about arrested journalists rather than posting the information online quickly is a priority for Stearns, he says. If Stearns heard about an arrest via email or Twitter from an unknown source, he would not add the name of the journalist to the list until he could verify the person was “indeed arrested, was indeed a journalist working for a news org,” he wrote. In most cases, he waited for two independent confirmations from others on Twitter, his own online research, or from the organization the journalist was working for. “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to quibble about who is a journalist, and who isn’t. My goal was to account for anyone who was clearly committing acts of journalism when they were arrested. However, I also recognize that to hold police and city officials accountable for these arrests, those being arrested had to identify as journalists publicly — either with some form of credentials or verbally,” Stearns wrote. In one case, he removed a journalist from his list after learning that the person was participating in the protests, not covering them, according to Poynter’s November 22 report on Stearns’ effort. Stearns told managing editor of Poynter.org Steve Myers by email that he has been criticized for including student journalists in his count and said “I reject the notion that student journalists are not full journalists, or somehow doesn’t deserve First Amendment protection.” Stearns’ blog can be found at http://stearns.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/trust-and-verify-how-i-curate-my-list-of-journalist-arrests/ and his tracking website can be found at http://storify.com/jcstearns/tracking-journalist-arrests-during-the-occupy-prot.

According to a November 4 Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) story, disorderly conduct charges were dropped in a New York City criminal court against the first reporter arrested while covering OWS. New York City public media broadcaster, WNET’s MetroFocus reporter John Farley had been arrested September 24 while interviewing two women who had been pepper-sprayed.

According to a November 18 post on Wired.com’s Threat Level blog, Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, said in a statement that the best way for reporters to avoid being arrested while covering OWS is to carry a NYPD-issued press pass. But the NYPD is not issuing press passes, the blog post said. “We aren’t issuing press credentials to reporters covering Occupy Wall Street,” Detective Gina Sarubbi, NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information, told Wired. Loeser later clarified that an NYPD press pass is restricted to reporters who regularly need to cross police lines when covering fire or crime related stories.

CJR and the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) have released tips for journalists who may find themselves in conflict with law enforcement as they continue to cover OWS demonstrations. Both organizations urge journalists to bring credentials with them to the protest and to keep them easily accessible. CJR recommends that journalists alert local authorities that their news organization plans to cover the protests, take protective gear, wear comfortable boots that they can run in, and pack a medical kit, among other suggestions. The full list of safety tips is available at http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/safety_tips_for_covering_occup.php. SPLC suggests that student journalists avoid the appearance of being participants in the protests, obey police orders, and if arrested or detained, show police press credentials and contact an editor or other staff representative as soon as possible. The full SPLC guide is available at http://www.splc.org/wordpress/?p=2722. Citizen Media Law Project has also created a citizen’s guide to reporting on OWS available at http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2011/citizens-guide-reporting-occupywallstreet.

Freelance Journalists Fired For Conduct at OWS and Related Protests

Two public radio freelance journalists made the news after being fired for their involvement with OWS and related causes. A November 14 CJR story reported Caitlin Curran, a freelance web producer for WNYC/PRI’s radio show “The Takeaway,” was fired from the show, which had been covering the OWS protest. Curran was let go after a picture of her holding a sign at a recent OWS protest went viral online, the story said. The firing led to a conversation about whether or not public radio stations should be firing employees over perceived political endorsements. Upon a request from NPR, WNYC issued an official statement about the firing of Curran. “[Curran] was expected to observe the general standards of journalistic practice and more specifically WNYC’s editorial guidelines which require that editorial employees be free of any conflict that might compromise the work of the show overall. … When Ms. Curran made the decision to participate in the protest and make herself part of the story, she violated our editorial standards.” Jay Rosen, media critic and New York University journalism professor, said in an interview with NPR’s Brooke Gladstone on November 4 for “On the Media” that he did not think the policy was helping public radio gain public trust and that public radio needs to recognize “that its people have lives.” Rosen also pointed out Curran’s freelance status. “It might be a good rule for WNYC to not try and control the lives of people that you don’t provide health insurance to. The fact that she’s not an employee, I think, is relevant, because WNYC is not investing in her career as much as it could. I would say there are limits to how much control we should have on our freelancers.” But, Richard Wald, former senior vice president at ABC News and Columbia University professor of ethics, disagreed. He told CJR that as long as ethics rules are clear from the outset, the news organization has a right to fire someone who violates the established standards. “The [news organization] is entitled to have their sense of what’s ethical, and you as the journalist are entitled to either accept or reject it,” said Wald. “If those rules are clear, even if the person is only part time, then they have every right to fire her.”

On October 20, the AP reported Lisa Simeone, a freelance host for “Soundprint,” a documentary show that is not produced by NPR but airs on about 35 of its affiliate stations across the country, was fired because she helped organize a Washington protest. “In my mind, it’s fine if you want to be a leader of an organized protest movement, but you can’t also be in a journalistic role,” Moira Rankin, president of “Soundprint” told the AP a day after firing Simeone. Simeone told the AP she has been serving on a steering committee of about 50 people who are organizing an occupation protest on Pennsylvania Avenue that is known as the October 2011 Movement. It is not connected to the OWS movement, but they share similar philosophies, Simeone told the AP. “I have never brought any of my political activities into my work for ‘Soundprint’ ‘NPR World of Opera’ or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra series,” she told the AP, adding that she does not cover politics or news. However, many news outlets reported the firing under some version of a headline that indicated NPR had fired Simeone over her participation in OWS protests. After receiving mail surrounding the firing of Simeone, NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos posted a statement on October 20 on NPR’s website clarifying that NPR was not responsible for Simeone’s termination. “Simeone . . . is a non-NPR employee who hosts an opera program produced by a North Carolina public radio station that has nothing to do with news. The program is distributed by NPR, but Simeone has no influence or role in NPR news. The issue surrounding her, therefore, is a management and legal one. Any comments listeners want to make should be addressed to Audience Services,” he wrote.

In an October 20 blog post written by Erik Wemple for The Washington Post’s opinion blog on news media, he clarified that NPR was not responsible for firing Simeone and that her dismissal was not over involvement in Occupy DC. According to Wemple’s post, Rankin questioned Simeone on her involvement as the organizer of the October 2011/Stop the Machine protests. NPR tweeted several news organizations asking for corrections and clarifications regarding the misreported information. “By tomorrow noon, this whole mess will be gone, its legacy a bunch of errors — and, hopefully, corrections — spread across media-obsessed websites,” Wemple wrote of the erroneous reports.

Coverage of OWS Sparks Debate Among Industry Professionals

Early on in the OWS movement, CJR’s Erika Fry considered in a September 29 column whether or not the protests were getting appropriate coverage by the news media. Fry said the question began to be “kicked around” on the blogosphere after Current TV’s Keith Olbermann alleged there was a “media blackout of the OWS movement.” The rumblings, Fry wrote, led the media to do some self-reflection. In a September 26 blog post, NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos wrote “We asked the newsroom to explain their editorial decision. Executive editor for news Dick Meyer came back: ‘The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.’” In a September 28 post The Atlantic’s Eric Randall argued that the media’s stories about the “non-coverage” of OWS events actually amounted to news coverage of the movement. “Columnists at well-regarded news outlets who chose to respond concluded that there were plenty of great reasons not to cover Occupy Wall Street. In delineating those reasons throughout this week, they got to write at length about the protestors’ quirks and shortcomings, making their defense of non-coverage of a protest read a lot like colorful coverage of a protest,” he wrote. But Fry pointed to other news outlets like Time magazine, which ran a story titled “Occupy Wall Street Protest: 12 Days and Little Sign of Slowing Down” on September 29. Fry concluded that less than two weeks into the protests, most journalists had found the protests were not significant enough to warrant widespread coverage. “It needs to be remembered that Occupy Wall Street has a lot at stake and a serious interest in perpetuating itself,” Fry wrote. “It may be that the effort — if not the underlying ideas — is just not that newsworthy.”

As coverage of the OWS movement picked up, some columnists equated the protests to those during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The New York Daily News published an October 9 column by veteran columnist Jimmy Breslin with the headline “Spirit of Selma reborn in N.Y.: Occupy Wall St. protests echo roots of 1965 civil rights movement.” Breslin covered the civil rights marches from Selma, Ala. to Montgomery in 1965. “They all cannot see the start of a long future that will make history. The crowds today at a small park on Broadway and Liberty are perhaps the most pleasant, uplifting scene that we’ve had around this city for so long,” he wrote. In an October 10 story, Capital, an online news publication covering New York City, pointed out that Breslin was “among the first prominent New York newspaper columnists to offer unqualified praise for the protest.” Breslin told a Capital reporter he was not sure what audience he was writing for, but that he had been disappointed by the media’s coverage of OWS up to that point — specifically stories in The New York Post. Breslin was referring to articles like an October 10 editorial in The New York Post criticizing coverage of the movement by the three major TV broadcast networks and newspapers like The New York Times. “[M]any reporters have been romanticizing the protests as akin to the turbulent ‘60s — blaming the police for disorderly conduct and studiously ignoring the garbage dump Zuccotti Park has become. Par for the media course, we guess,” The Post editorial said. Breslin told the Capital “The Post doesn’t count. [I]t should have a men’s room sign over it. ... Decrepit old Murdoch.”

Columbia University’s Todd Gitlin, a sociology and journalism professor who has been following the media’s coverage of protests since the 1960s, told Poytner’s Mallary Jean Tenore that the media’s coverage of OWS is “predictable,” “lazy,” and includes “knee-jerk preconceptions,” according to an October 11 story. Gitlin told Tenore the press has used some of the same methods they used during the anti-war protests of the 1960s by choosing to focus on outcasts and framing the movement as a crime story. Many journalists reporting on the OWS movement think “the way to report a social movement is to go take pictures of freakish looking people or ask three different people what they want and get three different answers and conclude that the thing is ‘incoherent,’” Gitlin told Tenore. “I think journalists fall into traps, which are partly the result of their routines and partly the result of bad habits.” Gitlin said the press has been interviewing “hippies” or people who are dressed differently at the demonstrations, rather than those people who look more mainstream. Gitlin observed that protestors have noticed the media’s tendency to do this, and photographed one sign that read: “Am I dressed too nice so the media doesn’t interview me?” Nevertheless, Gitlin was optimistic that as journalists deepen their understanding of the demonstrations, their coverage will become more insightful and informative. “News coverage last week wasn’t what it was the week before, and the movement isn’t what it was,” Gitlin said. “There’s an intricate balance between movements and media, and each learns from the other.”

As the movement continued to grow, so did the news coverage. An October 12 story in The New York Times titled “A News Story Is Growing With ‘Occupy’ Protests,” described how the movement spread across the country with similar increases the media coverage. “Coverage of the movement last week was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009,” according to Pew Research Center data. The Pew study showed that although cable news and radio stations initially ignored the protests entirely, coverage increased in early October and often included a positive or negative reactions to them. The story characterized the spike in coverage as “significant because, among other reasons, it may lend legitimacy to the movement and spur more people to seek out protest information on Facebook and other Web sites.” http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/10-12-11%20NII%20Final.pdf

Poynter’s Adam Hochberg wrote in an October 13 story that the complaints about the way the media cover OWS are not surprising because similar criticism surfaced around the coverage of the Tea Party movement, the Wisconsin collective bargaining protests, and Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity.” Hochberg said journalists are often cynical about covering protests, especially in metropolitan areas or college towns where they often occur regularly. “You can’t send reporters out every time somebody announces they’re mad as hell about something,” former Baltimore Sun deputy managing editor Sandra Banisky, who now teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, told Hochberg. “But if indeed there’s something that captures the public eye, then we have the obligation to go there.” Newsroom policies regarding protest coverage may also have had something to do with early coverage of the movement. According to Hochberg’s story, news organizations often have informal policies or maintain specific guidelines that outline the number of protestors that must be part of the demonstration before it receives coverage. At the Kansas City Star, for example, 25-person protests warrant a brief news story, while those with 100 or more participants justify longer pieces or the use of photos, the story said. Derek Donovan, the Star’s reader representative told Hochberg the paper wrote stories about “Occupy KC” after a rally attracted 300 people. Reuters columnist Jack Shafer said in an interview with Hochberg that he followed a similar standard when he edited the Washington City Paper.

Hochberg suggested that a better standard to judge newsworthiness of protests might be to analyze whether the message of the particular protests is resonating with the public. “While attendance at Occupy Wall Street’s New York encampment was inconsistent during its first couple of weeks, the movement already had started to spawn rallies in other cities and pick up traction on social media. Those trends suggested the protesters’ message had begun to strike a nerve,” he wrote.

By mid-November, Brian Stelter of The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog reported the Occupy Wall Street movement received more media attention the week of November 14 than it ever had before. The change in coverage, measured by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, was correlated with the November 15 police eviction of protestors from Zuccotti Park and the mass protests that followed, the post said. The week before, the OWS movement received the least amount of coverage since it began in September, accounting for only one percent of all news coverage the week of November 7. http://www.journalism.org/index_report/pej_news_coverage_index_november_1420_2011

In his report, Hochberg points out that media executives and bloggers are starting to deal with another issue beyond whether the coverage is adequate — developing long-term coverage plans if OWS continues into the winter months. “If this goes on, do you take a picture of them every day?” asked Banisky. “If it’s the same 50 people camped out, do they continue to be a story?” Dean Elwood, the news director at San Diego’s CBS affiliate, KFMB, said the station is already beginning to scale back coverage of the San Diego sit-in associated with OWS. “We’ve sort of been there, done that,” he said in a phone interview with Hochberg. “It starts becoming white noise. It’s the same story day after day after day.”

OWS Protestors Publish Media, Stir Up Controversy Over Use of Trademarked Logos

On October 1, demonstrators participating in OWS protests in New York City distributed the first issue of “the Occupied Wall Street Journal.” According to an October 4 story in The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper was a four-page issue with an initial print run of 50,000 and a second printing on October 3 of 20,000 copies. Co-editor Jed Brandt told the WSJ that using a traditional broadsheet paper brings a “super hip retro” feel to the social-media-savvy protest. “It’s so old, it’s new,” he told the WSJ. Brandt shares editorial responsibilities with Michael Levitin, a former reporter for the AP and Newsweek magazine.

The publication’s flag and font resembled that of the WSJ, which the newspaper pointed out in its story. “The name of this new publication … nods to a certain national newspaper with origins not that far from the protesters’ encampment in Zuccotti Park. Money was raised for the publication through fundraising website Kickstarter and received promotional help from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and “No Logo” author Naomi Klein. As of the first issue, the effort had raised $44,000 from 1,000 donors. The success of the NYC publication caught the attention of OWS Boston counterparts. “We are planning to put out our own issue,” Dana Schneider, a representative from the protesters’ media working group in Boston, told the WSJ. “Not the Occupied Wall Street Journal, but the Occupied Boston Globe.”

According to an October 17 story in the free daily newspaper Metro Boston, Occupy Boston protestors launched the online-only “Occupy Boston Globe” and started collecting money to fund a print version, but not before a warning from The Boston Globe to stop using its iconic name and look. “We do not condone the use of our trademark-protected name and logo by any organization,” said Robert Powers, The Boston Globe’s Vice President of Public Affairs in an interview with Metro. No formal actions have been taken against the OWS publication.

– Holly Miller
Silha Bulletin Editor