‘The danger is coming from different directions’ for protest journalists
By Zoe Ives
Before 2020, freelance journalist Samanta Helou Hernandez hadn’t covered many protests. After witnessing the murder of George Floyd on May 25 and the movement that followed, she began to feel that it was a moral imperative to contribute to the cause by documenting the actions taking place in Los Angeles.
The night of June 2, 2020, Hernandez was arrested by LAPD officers while photographing a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest outside of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s home in Hancock Park. Two days before, Garcetti had enacted a curfew beginning at 6 p.m. in both the city and county of Los Angeles. According to Hernandez, a large contingency of the protesters stayed out in the lamp-lit city streets after curfew as a form of civil disobedience.
“I heard someone say ‘they’re shooting,’ and I think in that moment I just ran because I saw people running.”
“At one point, the crowd that stayed started marching through the streets. There wasn’t really any police presence on the residential streets, but as soon as the crowd turned on to Wilshire, there was, like, major police presence,” she recounted. “I heard someone say ‘they’re shooting,’ and I think in that moment I just ran because I saw people running.”
They ran to a smaller residential street where they were surrounded by officers and kettled into the garage of an apartment building. They were then handcuffed with zip ties and detained.
Hernandez tried to explain to the officers that she was attending the protest as a journalist, but because she was working freelance she didn’t have press credentials on her person. Her hands were quite literally tied as she waited to be loaded onto a bus and taken to a precinct to be processed and ticketed.
At that point, Hernandez spotted her colleagues Brian Feinzimer and Lexis-Olivier Ray.
“I saw him [Ray] and I screamed out to him ‘Lex, they’re trying to arrest a journalist,’” she said. “He spoke to one of the officers and explained that I am a journalist and vouched for me. He showed them my clips and the tone shifted pretty quickly from there.”
As a result of Ray’s intervention, Hernandez was released from police custody without an arrest on her record.
Hernandez’s experience may be familiar to journalists that have found themselves covering protests in 2020. According to Forbes, there were over 328 Press Freedom violations this year before June 6 ranging anywhere from arrests to physical assaults targeting journalists. Some of these cases garnered more media attention than others, such as the arrest of KPCC reporter Josie Huang on Sept. 12.
When reporting on protests, journalists are not able to solely focus on doing their jobs. They are also trying to protect themselves from the very conditions they are working tirelessly to document.
“Depending on the different people I’m covering I feel like the danger is coming from different directions,” said freelance photojournalist Brian Feinzimer.
Feinzimer has been covering Black Lives Matter actions for the past two years. In his experience, journalists covering left-leaning and Black Lives Matter protests are in danger as a result of how the police respond to the demonstration. At a right-wing rally, like a Trump rally, Feinzimer says that the risk “comes from the people who are protesting.”
“At a right wing rally I would be a bit more afraid of the protestors getting out of hand and becoming violent in their own way, because I’ve been affected by that type of violence as well,” Feinzimer said.
In 2017, Feinzimer was attacked by Trump supporters while photographing a Trump rally in Huntington Beach.
“It doesn’t deter me from working these kinds of things, it just kind of reminds me to be more mindful of my surroundings and things that are changing and attitudes,” he explained.
That being said, anti-journalist sentiment isn’t isolated to right-wing protests. According to Lexis-Olivier Ray, a freelance multimedia reporter and artist, journalists are also regularly targeted at other kinds of demonstrations.
“Something I’m definitely aware of, you know, is some people view the media as being just as bad as the cops.”
“I’ve definitely been at protests that weren’t Trump rallies and felt like I was a target,” Ray said. “Something I’m definitely aware of, you know, is some people view the media as being just as bad as the cops.”
On Nov. 28, Ray began showing symptoms of COVID-19. He tested positive on Dec. 3, and has been quarantined ever since. Although Ray had been covering the daily protests in front of Mayor Garcetti’s house before he began showing symptoms, he thinks he may have caught it from his girlfriend. According to Ray, the people at BLM protests have been incredibly stringent about mask wearing. He described a time at a protest where there was an individual in the crowd who wasn’t wearing a mask. This person was singled out, and accused of being a police officer, or someone who clearly was not affiliated with BLM.
“I think those people typically just really stand out, especially at the BLM actions because BLM is really tight with how they do things,” Ray said.
In conjunction with mandatory masking, mutual aid in the form of sanitation has been a big hit at BLM actions this year. It is normal when attending a BLM protest to see people handing out hand sanitizer and bottles of water, and providing first aid. According to Feinzimer, these actions would be uncommon at other kinds of political demonstrations.
“I was at a Proud Boys rally in Oregon the day after election day and most people weren’t even wearing masks, let alone having hand sanitizer that was visible,” Feinzimer said.
“It’s just a different mentality about mutual aid availability.”
For somebody who is immunocompromised, like Feinzimer, contracting COVID-19 could mean a lot more than having to stay at home for a couple weeks.
“I keep a huge bottle of sanitizer in the door of my car, so that’s the first thing I hit when I get back,” he said. “I try to be mindful of my camera as well because I touch that quite a lot, but the major touch points, you know, phone, camera, keys.”
According to a recent poll by Gallup, thirty-three percent of Democrats and fifty-eight percent of Republicans stated in 2020 that they have “no trust at all” in news covered by mass media.
According to a recent poll by Gallup, thirty-three percent of Democrats and fifty-eight percent of Republicans stated in 2020 that they have “no trust at all” in news covered by mass media. This distrust in the media may also explain why these movements have responded so differently in regards to preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
Despite what some might believe about “fake news,” the general consensus among the journalists who spoke with The Courier was that the mission of protest reporting should be to document the events without latching onto popular falsehoods and tropes to tell the story.
According to LAist photojournalist Chava Sanchez, the single most important thing a reporter can do while out in the field is provide adequate context for the story being covered. Ideally, this context is achieved through the photograph itself.
“I think I shoot over 1,000 photos in two hours. I try to be as generous as possible to the subjects I’m shooting,” Sanchez said, laughing. “I try to capture everything so I can get a pretty fair understanding of what happened out there.”
Sanchez also emphasized the importance of talking to the people he is photographing so that he can write detailed captions. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has made navigating those interactions more difficult for Sanchez, as people are much more cautious about speaking with strangers for extended periods of time.
According to Hernandez, part of providing an accurate depiction of a protest is taking a step back from the more eye-catching moments and focusing on the quieter, more intimate moments that sustain a movement. It also involves approaching events with a fluid perspective, trying to follow them as they shift and evolve, rather than just covering whatever the end result happens to be.
“For a photojournalist to go in and shoot, like, burning cars and graffiti and not shoot what caused that anger and that escalation, it’s a disservice.”
“The larger, mainstream publications didn’t provide that context in the beginning,” she said. “Like, if you were there on May 30, from when it was completely peaceful to when it evolved into burning cars and people being shot with rubber bullets indiscriminately, you’ll see that what happened is that the police really instigated things. For a photojournalist to go in and shoot, like, burning cars and graffiti and not shoot what caused that anger and that escalation, it’s a disservice.”
Hernandez believes that photojournalism is as much about looking inward and analyzing yourself as it is about analyzing the events going on around you. Part of this process includes understanding when you need to step back and take a break from working in the field. The reporters who regularly cover protests often find themselves leaning on coping skills such as reading, writing, being out in nature, and, if you’re Chava Sanchez, playing video games, to unwind after a tough day in the field.
“I’m not going to lie, like, it’s not easy, it’s not a natural thing,” said Lexis-Olivier Ray. “It’s just that this moment kind of demands this level of work, and I’ve got to find a way to get it done.”
