Journalists covering the protests and riots that have erupted in US cities after the killing of George Floyd have reported being shot at, teargassed and arrested, as well as being intimidated by crowds.
More than 50 incidents of violence and harassment against media workers were reported on social media and in news outlets on Friday and Saturday, according to a tally the Guardian collated.
They included the blinding of Linda Tirado, a freelance photojournalist and activist who has contributed to the Guardian, who was hit in the eye with a nonlethal round while covering unrest in Minneapolis; the arrest of the HuffPost US reporter Chris Mathias during protests in New York; and the shooting of the Swedish foreign correspondent Nina Svanberg, who was struck in the leg by several rubber bullets on Friday night.
“They’re sighting us in,” a member of a CBS News crew was heard saying in another incident in Minneapolis on Saturday, as police fired rubber bullets at the team, who said they were wearing press credentials and carrying large cameras. A sound engineer was struck in the arm, a journalist from the outlet said.
A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist, Susan Ormiston, was hit with a gas canister also while covering the protests in the city. “The thing is, we were in that parking lot all by ourselves,” she said in a broadcast. The police “fired at us to clear us away but we clearly had our camera equipment visible”.
Minneapolis was the scene of especially acute unrest on Saturday night as authorities imposed a curfew and deployed the Minnesota state national guard to clear the streets and prevent the rioting and looting of the previous night.
Protests have spread to more than 30 states across the US since Floyd’s death on Monday. Curfews are in place in dozens of cities and hundreds of people have been arrested.
David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, said the reports of attacks on journalists were “appalling and must be condemned and perpetrators held accountable”.
“They are a repudiation of fundamental rights enjoyed by all Americans, under the constitution and human rights law,” he said on Twitter. “Poor training combined with incessant attacks by Trump on the press as enemy no doubt contribute to an environment ready for such abuse.”
The US president has regularly called the media the “enemy of the people”, including in a tweet he posted on Saturday.
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders ranked the US 48th in the world in its 2019 index, down three places as a result of growing abuse of journalists in the country. “Never before have US journalists been subjected to so many death threats or turned so often to private security firms for protection,” the report said.
The majority of the most recent incidents appeared to be perpetrated by police, but least two involved crowds. A crew from the conservative outlet Fox News was surrounded by protesters outside the White House early on Saturday morning and jeered at and pelted with objects until they were forced to clear the area. An angry crowd also stormed the headquarters of CNN in Atlanta on Friday.
Police in Louisville, Kentucky, apologised on Saturday after a television reporter covering protests in the city on Friday night was hit with what appeared to be a pepper ball, shouting “I’m getting shot” live on air.
Many of Saturday’s attacks were filmed by the reporters involved. In his footage, the VICENews correspondent Michael Anthony Adams could be heard shouting “press” repeatedly as an officer approached him with his gun raised.
“I’m press,” he says. “I don’t care,” the officer replies. He was pepper sprayed while lying on the ground shortly afterwards.
Some of the incidents were broadcast on national television, including one in which a nonlethal explosive device was fired near the MSNBC correspondent Morgan Chesky and his crew. The CNN correspondent Omar Jiminez was arrested live on air on Friday and released a short time later.
The investigative reporter Ryan Raiche said he had been standing with other journalists in Minneapolis in what he thought was a safe area when police started targeting the group. “We kept saying we’re media,” he said in tweeted. “Police teargassed and pepper sprayed the entire group.”