Law enforcement officers have photographed the faces or IDs of nearly three dozen journalists in Oregon and Minnesota in recent months, according to new data published by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. These measures don’t appear to serve any law enforcement purpose beyond intimidating reporters who are doing their job.
Department of Justice subpoenas for the phone records of three Washington Post reporters represent an outrageous invasion of the First Amendment rights of journalists to communicate with sources, and the defense of their use by the Biden administration raises alarming questions about its commitment to press freedom.
In the past two months, lawmakers in Florida and New Jersey have advanced misguided proposals that would effectively classify assaults on journalists as hate crimes. These proposals would do little to fix the underlying issues and would likely create a host of new problems.
After a tumultuous 2020 saw unprecedented numbers of journalists arrested and detained, some held hope that police departments would learn from public backlash and change their behavior. In a coordinated crackdown on protests that included the arrest or detention of more than a dozen journalists, the Los Angeles Police Department showed last week that it has done no such thing.
As we come to the end of Sunshine Week — the long-running annual initiative focusing on government transparency — we're taking a look at how the first few months of the Biden administration have shaped up on that front.
A jury in Polk County, Iowa voted to acquit reporter Andrea Sahouri after she was arrested last summer while covering a protest. The case has been widely criticized by press freedom and human rights advocates around the world.
At least four journalists around the country will face trial this month following their arrests while covering Black Lives Matter protests, part of the unprecedented number of legal detentions of reporters in 2020.
Journalists — especially those without institutional newsroom support — rely on tools from major tech companies like Google and YouTube for newsgathering, production and distribution as a matter of course. As these information giants publicly wrestle with controversial content moderation decisions that dominate headlines and Congressional hearings, their decisions also run the risk of stifling routine reporting.
A coalition of two dozen press freedom, civil liberties, and human rights groups call for an immediate end to the prosecution of Julian Assange by Biden's Department of Justice.
Freedom of the Press Foundation releases its 2020 Impact Report, outlining the work we’ve accomplished in the past year, an overview of our major projects and initiatives, and how we will be expanding on our work in 2021.
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