What obligations activists have to journalists is a serious question, but what obligations journalists have to activists is a serious question too.
When I was upstate with my kids for the big national #FamiliesBelongTogether protest in June, a local reporter saw us painting signs before the march.
He asked me if he could talk to the kids, asked me if he could take photos, asked if he could use their names in the article.
We were in a public place. He could have taken photos without asking, approached one of the kids when I was somewhere else. He chose to restrict what he photographed and who he talked to for ethical reasons.
What those rules should look like isn't an easy question to answer. What those rules ARE isn't an easy question to answer. This stuff is complicated, and journalists need to acknowledge that.
And as @lirael_abhorsen suggests, violating personal space at a march is something journalists do too—far more to activists than activists do to them, in my experience.
Some things that people say in public should be treated as private and off-limits to journalists. Some photographs should not be taken. Which ones? There's no consensus. We're still working that out.
Hostility to journalists is too often treated as hostility to free speech.
Just one more example. I was at a rally/press-conference a while back. Inadvertently stepped into the sight line of a news camera. Got yelled at by the cameraman, told to move.
I was on a public street, exercising my first amendment right to assembly. My right to stand on that sidewalk was indisputable—inalienable, even. He had no legal grounds to demand that I move.
I moved, of course, and didn't think anything more of it, beyond being mildly annoyed by his tone and mildly embarassed that I hadn't noticed I was in his way.
Was he expressing hostility to the first amendment when he demanded that I move? Of course not. If he'd elbowed me out of the way of his camera would he have been chilling my right to assemble freely? No.
His interests in that moment weren't the same as mine. He was advocating for his interests. That's it. And most of the time when a protester confronts a journalist at an action, it's exactly the same thing—a divergence of interests, expressed forcefully.
And circling back to the rally I attended with my kids, it's entirely possible that the reporter we talked to that day was asking permission not because of ethics but because he knew that photographing and talking to kids without permission might piss people off.
"Will doing this cause a ruckus that I don't want?" is already part of the reporter's calculus when deciding how to cover a protest, in other words.
"We're here for you" is a fiction that journalists peddle to activists, and peddle to themselves about activists. It's often the case that media coverage is good for a protest, but not always, and not all coverage.
(I've got to get back to work, but I could do a whole other thread about how much more deferential news photogs are at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade than they are at protests. Who is seen as deserving of privacy in public is not at all a straightforward question.)
Seeing that this thread is getting passed around fair amount by reporters. My DMs are open if folks want to dig a bit deeper into these issues.
