Increased danger" in the field (CNN) |
A new survey of local news leaders illustrates the dangers that American journalists face while out on routine assignments in the field.
The data comes from the Radio Television Digital News Association, which is releasing the first report from its RTDNA/Newhouse School at Syracuse University Survey on Thursday. The group gave CNN a sneak peek.
"More than one in five TV news directors reported there had been an attack on their newsroom employees in 2021, the continuation of a troubling trend of increased danger to journalists," the group says.
"The bigger the market, the more likely that there have been attacks," the group adds, meaning that local stations in big cities like New York and San Francisco report more incidents than smaller counterparts.
The TV news directors described all sorts of disruptions – police detaining a crew covering a protest, an assailant punching a reporter on the street, a crowd shaking and pounding a station vehicle, a photographer hit in the face with a rock, reporters receiving racist verbal harassment, and so forth.
Radio news directors and managers reported "much lower" levels of assault and harassment, RTDNA adds, but some of the examples they shared were equally disturbing.
"This report is further evidence that an element of American society continues to fall for the vitriol that's been tarnishing journalists unfairly for the last several years," RTDNA executive director Dan Shelley told me. "Unfortunately, some people in that category resort to violence to carry out the delusion that reporters and photographers are out to get them rather than what they're really doing - serving their communities by seeking and reporting the truth."
--> Related: The Reporters Committee has started a four-part newsletter series analyzing press freedom violations confirmed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in 2021. |
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