journalist arrests – Josh Stearns

Around 6:30 pm on Friday, February 10, a credentialed journalist who appears to be Jacquie Kubin was arrested at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC. Activism, especially from Occupy DC, was heavy at points around the event.

Jacquie Kubin is an editor with the Washington Times Communities site and Donne Tempo, a women’s travel site. According to people on the scene she had CPAC issued credentials. One person has confirmed her identity, but I am still waiting for confirmation from Kubin or the Washington Times. [Update: I have now confirmed Jacquie Kubin as the arrested journalist]

Based on two videos of her interactions with police, which can be seen together below, as well as eye witness accounts, it looks like she was pushed and then left the sidewalk to get the police officer’s name. After being warned to get back, she is arrested.

In the second video you can hear her say that police are hurting her, that she is not resisting arrest, and then calling a nearby friend to take her camera and call her husband. Video footage recorded by@Timcast and @Karlwitak. (Note: I have deleted a few seconds of audio near the end to protect her phone number, which she shouts out. )

Kubin is the second journalist arrested during Occupy DC protests, and the 64th journalist arrested at Occupy events since Occupy Wall Street began. See video below.Continue reading “Second Journalist Arrested at Occupy DC Protests”

Today’s celebration of the 220th birthday of the Bill of Rights comes after three months of journalist arrests and press suppression in cities across America — the most recent of which happened just this week. When the NYPD arrested a group of photographers, live video-streamers and other citizen journalists at an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City earlier this week, it rekindled a long smoldering debate over who is a journalist.

The people arrested were all aligned with the Occupy movement, with some serving on the Occupy Wall Street media team, but based on videos and first-hand accounts they were primarily there to bear witness and cover the events. In fact, over the course of the Occupy movement, in many cases when police kept other journalists at arm’s length, the only video and reports coming out of Occupy raids were coming from these kinds of citizen journalists.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The question “who is a journalist” has been raised often over the past two months as reports of press suppression and journalist arrests have spread from city to city. See, for example, the debates here, here and here. I’ve already described my views on this in relation to my own work monitoring journalist arrests at Occupy events: “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.”

But, tangled up in the debates over who is a journalist are very real legal debates about who is given press credentials and what protections those press credentials provide. In general, the press credentialing system is broken — a poor fit for the media landscape we find ourselves in. The courts have already ruled that, as more people gain access to the tools of reporting, “news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.” If the question is not who is a journalist, but rather, what are the acts of journalism that should be protected, then we need to rethink what a “press credential” actually is.Continue reading “Your Actions Should Be Your Credentials”