Columbia Journalism Review reports: On the night of November 14, when the NYPD sprung a surprise raid to evict Occupy Wall Street’s foundational Zuccotti Park encampment, credentialed press were pushed back by police into a pen, unable to watch the eviction at close hand. Mother Jones magazine’s Josh Harkinson live-tweeted how he was physically dragged along the ground and removed from the park by officers. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg defended police action the next morning, stating that journalists were kept at a distance to “protect” them. Commentators on Twitter, meanwhile, decried the move as a “media blackout.”
The Occupy Wall Street movement has proven a consistent challenge for journalists since demonstrations in New York first began in mid-September and spread to over seventy U.S. cities. Diffuse, amorphous, and leaderless, it has resisted traditional media narratives about the nature and structure of protest groups. Beyond the theoretical challenges, newsrooms are having to adapt to volatile crowds and unpredictable police actions. Over half a dozen professional journalists have been injured or detained covering Occupy events in less than two months.
Reporters from Oregon’s KGW-TV News will no longer be covering Occupy Portland protests in groups of less than three. After a masked demonstrator shoved one reporter and a man with a bloodied face approached another in a threatening manner, the station management changed its policy in order to have more staff on the ground, looking out for each other.
“The situation is constantly changing, we can’t use old solutions and old tactics for what appear to be new and developing circumstances,” said Mary Cavallaro, the assistant national executive director of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), a national labor union that represents over 70,000 artists and journalists. Cavallaro said that AFTRA was looking to employers to provide resources and training, communication networks, and equipment for reporters in the field.