Journalist Arrests Are on the Rise, Almost Entirely Because of Protests Against Israel

The Freedom of the Press Foundation tracks U.S. Press Freedom, documenting instances of “arrests of journalists and the seizure of their equipment to assaults to interrogations at the U.S. border.” Yesterday, they released information about this year’s arrests of journalists, and found 48 instances, more than the previous two years and the third-highest annual number they have documented.

Almost all of these arrests took place at protests over Israel’s genocide of Gaza—ninety percent. This is as much a story about the New York City Police Department as it is of cops around the country, as the NYPD was “responsible for nearly half the arrests and detentions this year, all while the reporters and photographers were covering demonstrations.”

Kirstin McCudden, vice president of editorial of Freedom of the Press Foundation said that “Journalists were arrested, detained or charged with a crime at the rate of nearly one per week this year in the United States, and each one of those has serious consequences for our free press. A compounding factor is that the vast majority of arrests in 2024 were during protests, meaning those journalists were often unable to freely cover stories deemed important by the public.”

America is a land of endless contradictions. The First Amendment is rightly hailed as our greatest asset and the base of our democracy, but when it gets in the way of shipping weapons to our chief client state in order to facilitate a genocide, then the authoritarian desires of the NYPD take precedent over our stated values. Americans talk a big game about peaceful protest and how we admire people like Martin Luther King Jr. who used it to change the world, but when asked about protests like “disrupting public events” or “blocking traffic,” most Americans do not believe that is an acceptable form of protest.

We are a country of hypocrites in so many ways, and Israel’s genocide has exposed it once and for all. The stenographers in the press wax poetic about their duty to the truth, but articles like this from Hadas Gold in CNN reporting how student journalists were arrested at campus protests get a fraction of publicity from their employers that the outright lies from TV show hosts like Jake Tapper do. It’s instructive to pay attention to which journalists have covered the arrests of journalists at these protests and which stenographers do not show solidarity with people they claim to be in the same profession with.

Freedom of the Press Foundation’s tracker “has consistently found that protests are the most dangerous location for journalists in the United States: Four out of every five arrests (as well as assaults) of journalists since 2017 took place at demonstrations,” and that “By contrast, the number of journalist arrests unrelated to protests in a given year has remained relatively consistent, with between five to 13 journalists detained each year since 2017.” Photojournalist Josh Pacheco believes that there is “a perfect storm for increased police violence, especially at protests and especially targeting journalists,” and “The tactic is to take the eyes and the helping hands first, before getting to the protesters.”

Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, told the Tracker that “The fact that [NYPD] took two photojournalists off the street, preventing them from making any more images or transmitting the ones they already had on a matter of extreme public concern, is very disturbing,” and that “we are very concerned that they are perfecting ‘catch-and-release’ to an art form.” As of publication, five journalists are still facing charges.

This speaks to how emboldened the police feel in this country, that their violent and authoritarian instincts can take precedent over our founding amendment, as just covering protest slowly becomes criminalized, to say nothing of how the cops treat protest itself. Not to mention how a simple Google search seems to indicate that no mainstream outlet has written up this alarming report from Freedom of the Press Foundation. This is a bad omen going into the second Trump era, and there is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse any time soon.