As campus protests return, schools must do better on press rights
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators and pro-Israel demonstrators clash at the University of California, Los Angeles on April 25, 2024.
Spring semester is typically filled with talks of finals and impatient waiting for summer to start. But last April, more than six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, students frustrated with university leadership for ignoring calls to divest from companies supporting the war effort filled campus streets and lawns with pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments.
Many of those demonstrations resulted in unwarranted and unnecessary arrests, assaults, and abuses of both student and professional journalists after college administrations deployed local and campus police to dampen student activism.
Four months later, the war is still happening — and the protests are likely to return. As students make their way back to campus for the 2024-25 academic year, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) authored letters to universities around the country, outlining the constitutional framework that protects the press and providing guidelines for university leaders and law enforcement to follow to allow journalists to cover protests freely and safely.
From the Vietnam War to climate change to the Black Lives Matter movement, college and university campuses have historically served as gathering places for students, faculty, and community members alike to assemble and protest their grievances. These moments shape history, and journalists must be allowed to report on them. Universities play up past student anti-war activism for nostalgia-based marketing and PR campaigns, but when that history repeated itself during the Israel-Gaza war, schools suppressed coverage by arresting journalists.
Colleges should not repeat the same mistakes. In the letter, FPF explains that even when protests get out of hand, journalists have the right to remain on-site, and are entitled by law to document, record, or film any officer performing their duties without facing fear of arrest. Student journalists reporting on pro-Palestinian encampments last year were met with spray irritants, fireworks, police kettling, and arrests — all of which are violations of their First Amendment rights, particularly if journalists were targeted. As the letter explains,
Protecting the press is not about elevating journalists above others, but upholding the First Amendment right of the public to receive information. Without journalists present on the scene and able to report freely, officers are less accountable, and abuses of non-journalists are more likely. Incidents of harassment or violence against journalists have a “chilling effect” that dissuades other journalists from doing their jobs effectively.
Recipients of the letter include the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and many more.
As an example, you can read our correspondence to UCLA here or below. And if you think your school’s administrators could use a reminder about press rights, please reach out and let us know.