(Reuters) – On Friday evening, viewers watched as CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested on live television while covering a protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
By Saturday, as protesters and the police clashed across the nation, reporter Kaitlin Rust from Louisville, Kentucky local station WAVE News screamed on air “I’m getting shot! I’m getting shot!” as cameras caught her and her crew being targeted at gunpoint and shot at by local police with pepper balls.
Over a three-day period, organizations that track press violence documented about two dozen acts of violence, including an incident on Saturday night in Minneapolis during which Reuters journalist Julio-Cesar Chavez and Reuters security adviser Rodney Seward were struck and injured by rubber bullets.
From Los Angeles to Minneapolis to New York, what seemed like isolated attacks on the press at political rallies and protests over the last few years intensified as trust in media is near a decade low, some media experts said.
“It is an extremely scary place to be and not a place where journalists have felt since 1968 in this country,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, referring to journalists being harassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“The numerous, targeted attacks that journalists reporting on protests across the