Washington/New York — On a rainy day in September, a group of journalists gathered in a nondescript office building outside Washington. Some were seasoned reporters, others still students. But they were all there to learn how to stay safe while covering elections and unrest.
Organized by the International Women’s Media Foundation, or IWMF, the training session was part of a national campaign to teach journalists based in the United States how to stay safe on assignment, including while reporting on the presidential campaign.
Over the past year, the IWMF has trained more than 620 journalists across 13 states.
“This safety tour has really been illuminating. Unfortunately, what we are hearing is quite alarming, and it’s not just about election reporting,” IWMF executive director Elisa Lees Munoz told VOA. “What we’re understanding more and more is that literally every beat in America has become a polarizing beat, and therefore has become a dangerous beat.”
Three times as many journalists have been arrested in the U.S. this year compared to last year, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. More journalists have been assaulted too, according to the group’s data.
“We’re seeing journalists still struggling every day to uphold that basic right of freedom of the press,” Kirstin McCudden, the Tracker’s managing editor, told VOA at the group’s office in Brooklyn. “It’s a little alarming.”
Many of the incidents took place during pro-Palestine protests. In one case, three photojournalists were arrested in Chicago in August while covering a protest on the outskirts of the Democratic National Convention.
“Police departments feel that they have the power to violate the rights of journalists. Then what ends up happening is it turns into a snowball effect. More police agencies crack down even harder,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which publishes the Tracker.
While press freedom is often a local issue, it also matters what presidential candidates are saying and how they treat the press, multiple analysts said.
The campaign of former President Donald Trump has been punctuated by the same kinds of attacks against the media that characterized his presidency, the analysts who spoke with VOA said.
Leading up to and during Trump’s presidency, Stephanie Sugars, a senior reporter at the Tracker, documented more than 2,000 anti-media posts by Trump on the social media platform X, then known as Twitter. The tenor of those posts evolved from targeting individual journalists to targeting specific news outlets to targeting the media industry writ large.
“A lot of that rhetoric is still in play and is part of his playbook,” Sugars said. She added that the Tracker would monitor anti-media posts from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris if those kinds of posts existed.
Sugars cautioned against solely blaming Trump for the increased hostility facing journalists in the U.S. But, she said, he hasn’t helped the situation either.
“If you sow distrust in these sorts of external sources and really encourage your followers, those who support you, to only believe what you specifically say, that’s a great way to maintain firm control over what the narrative is, what truth is understood to be, and that’s an incredible amount of power to have,” Sugars said.
McCudden agreed. “Rhetoric does matter, and it’s fuel to the fire,” she said.
In response to VOA’s request for comment, Trump’s presidential campaign shared a statement that Republican National Committee spokesperson Taylor Rogers originally provided to the conservative news site the Daily Caller.
In it, Rogers described Trump as a “champion for free speech” and said that “everyone was safer under President Trump, including journalists.”
Mitigating risk
The hostile environment for journalists comes at a time when trust in media is already at a record low in the U.S., according to Gallup. Attacks or hostile rhetoric against the press only make the situation worse.
So far, the Tracker has documented only a few violations directly related to the election. But, McCudden said, “History tells us that we should be worried and aware.”
She cited the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol, where 18 journalists were assaulted.
It may take a few days for the election results to be confirmed, McCudden said. “And in that time, tensions will be high. And journalists whose job it is to cover these tense times are also often in harm’s way,” she said.
The IWMF’s safety training originally was directed at journalists in combat zones and dangerous regions. But following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when attacks on the media began to rise, the IWMF realized U.S. based journalists would benefit from them, too, according to Munoz.
For Jennifer Thomas, a journalism professor at Howard University in Washington, the training offered her the tools to better help her students to stay safe.
“Back when I was reporting locally and then nationally and covering news, we didn’t have to really be that concerned when we went out to cover an event,” said Thomas, who previously worked at CNN. “Well, times have changed.”
During the training, Thomas and the others were introduced to a range of resources on issues including covering riots and dealing with an arrest. Munoz thinks this information will become all the more important for journalists in the U.S. in years to come.
