The Backstory: A reporter arrested while covering a protest faces trial Monday. Here’s why you should care.

I’m USA TODAY editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll, and this is The Backstory, insights into our biggest stories of the week. If you’d like to get The Backstory in your inbox every week, sign up here.

Over the summer, six USA TODAY Network journalists were taken into police custody while doing their jobs, reporting from various racial justice protests. Three were jailed. They yelled, “I’m press, I’m press,” as they were tackled.Forced to the ground. Pepper sprayed.Handcuffed.

One of them, Andrea Sahouri, is going to trial Monday. The Des Moines Register reporter, eyes still burning from pepper spray, spoke about her arrest on video as she sat in the back of the police van last May. 

She had been reporting from a protest at Merle Hay Mall on May 31 in Des Moines when police began to deploy tear gas to disperse the crowd. Her then-boyfriend was with her for safety.

“We were running. My boyfriend who was with me was hit by (a projectile) and as I was seeing if his leg was OK, police came closer,” she said minutes after the arrest. “We went around the corner and I was saying, you know, ‘I’m press, I’m press, I’m press.’ Police deliberately took me, sprayed pepper spray on my face and then put me in zip ties.

“I’m just doing my job as a journalist,” she said under the glow of a red light, still sniffling from the pepper spray. “I’m just out here reporting as I see.”

Sahouri faces charges of interference with official acts and failure to disperse. If convicted, she could be sentenced to 30 days in jail and $625 – for each offense. 

This is a reporter. In America. Facing jail time for reporting from a news event. Yes, protests are chaotic. Still, the arrest was wrong. And the fact that the prosecutor is still pursuing charges is beyond wrong – it’s chilling.

Sahouri said she clearly identified herself – police contend she did not. The news organization’s attorneys contacted police immediately after Sahouri’s arrest, said Register editor Carol Hunter, “making it very clear that she was a working journalist on assignment at the time.”

Still, she was held for three hours. And the charges have never been dropped.

Our reporters know to follow direction from police. They have to obey the same laws and orders as the general public. But they will continue to report and observe even as they are moving away from a scene.

“She was there on behalf of the public serving as the public’s eyes and ears, observing and recording, really history in the making,” Hunter said. “This was news that our readers deserve to know, and she was prevented from being there to do her job.

“This is a fundamental press freedom case. You can’t have press freedom without being able to gather the news.”

Polk County Attorney John Sarcone declined to comment to USA TODAY, citing the pending trial and ethical considerations.

“We strongly disagree with how this matter has been characterized and will do our talking in the courtroom, which is the proper place to deal with this case. Have a good day,” Sarcone said Aug. 20 in a written statement to the Register.

Protests erupted nationwide in response to the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, while Floyd cried out he couldn’t breathe. Floyd had been accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill, and he was handcuffed and pinned by three officers during his arrest. Chauvin faces charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter, but may face additional charges as well. Jury selection in Chauvin’s trial is scheduled to start Monday.

Floyd’s death came soon after the shootings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery – two other high-profile incidents in which Black people were killed: Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, by police in her home, and Arbery by armed white residents of a south Georgia neighborhood while he was out jogging. 

In that week following Floyd’s death, journalists fanned out to cover protests nationwide. More than 200 of them were struck with projectiles, physically assaulted or directly targeted with tear gas. Of those assaults, more than 80% were by law enforcement.

That’s according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. This number doesn’t count general assaults, like getting caught up in a crowd doused with pepper spray. The vast majority of these journalists were wearing press passes or had other visible markers that identified them as press.

There are photos and videos of reporters holding up their press passes as they are being pepper sprayed or punched while live on air. Police slapped a phone out of the hands of Kelly Jordan, a Detroit Free Press photojournalist, as she was livestreaming a protest on USA TODAY. 

Free Press reporter David Jessecalled the protest he covered on May 30 “one of the craziest nights of my career. Police shot rubber bullets at us even though we were moving where they wanted us to go, holding up our press passes and yelling ‘media.'”

Kirstin McCudden, managing editor of the Press Freedom Tracker, says their documentation shows “that journalists were targeted with assault and arrest by law enforcement across the nation” during this time.

Why? It’s a question she gets often. “It was an incredibly tense time in the United States,” she said. Then you add in militarization of police and, at the time, an administration entirely hostile to journalists.

Her organization tracked the number of times former President Donald Trump attacked or degraded the media. He tweeted against the media 2,520 times from when he announced his candidacy for president to when he was banned from Twitter. That averages to more than once per day, McCudden points out.

In addition to the assaults, there were at least 126 arrests or detainments of journalists in 2020. Thirteen still face charges, including Sahouri. 

“Why were they arrested in the first place when they have a right to be there?” McCudden asked. “And why are these charges still pending? There’s no good excuse for it.”

David Ardia, a law professor and co-director at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Media Law and Policy, told reporter Ryan Miller this week that to go to trial in a case like this is “exceedingly rare.”

The First Amendment does not give journalists a “free pass” to do what the public is not permitted to do at a protest, Ardia said, but police departments and prosecutors do not often arrest or prosecute journalists for covering the events.

What possible justice is served, what cause is served, by prosecuting a journalist for reporting from a protest?

“It’s clearly sending a signal, whether it’s intentional or not, to other reporters,” Ardia said. “Don’t cover protests in Des Moines.”

Or Portland. Or Los Angeles. Or Worcester, Massachusetts.  Or Graham, North Carolina. 

The list, outrageously, goes on. 

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Nicole Carroll is editor-in-chief of USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter here. Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free experience or electronic newspaper replica here

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