Multiple journalists reported being blocked, intimidated, roughed up, and assaulted by protesters while trying to cover a demonstration in Portland, Oregon last week, according to social media posts and The Oregonian. During the protest, activists occupied public streets and sidewalks around a home on North Mississippi Avenue to demonstrate against the eviction of a Black and Indigenous family. The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office said it was moving to enforce a court-ordered eviction following a legal battle that started in November 2018.
“@GenevieveReaume and I were assaulted while walking into the barricaded area on N. Mississippi,” Ric Peavyhouse, a photojournalist for KATU-TV, a local ABC affiliate, tweeted along with video of the incident on Dec. 8. “It seemed safe at first but a crowd quickly surrounded us. One of our phones was smashed. We wanted to talk to those involved in the demonstration.”
“When I saw Ric getting surrounded, I took out my phone to record. Within seconds it gets knocked from my hand,” Reaume, a KATU reporter, tweeted along with a video that appears to show a demonstrator stomp on the phone as she reaches for it.
“Sorry for the blood,” Reaume said in a tweet featuring a photo of her bleeding finger. “Hand isn’t broken, thankfully! Wound was glued up at urgent care.”
The group PNW Youth Liberation Front later suggested that journalists and video streamers were putting demonstrators’ lives at risk by broadcasting their images from the protest without consent. The organization also tweeted an image that says, “F*** press.”
“To streamers and press: are you ready to be responsible for someone’s death? To others: when you see someone streaming or filming, are you ready to let your inaction kill someone?” the group tweeted on Dec. 10. “Respect means getting people’s explicit individual consent before filming them in any way, showing them what footage you’ve taken when asked, and deleting footage you’re asked to delete. Anyone who won’t respect basic consent is a f***ing creep, and a danger to the community here. … Respecting people is cool because it’s both basic decency and a way to not get hit.”
PNW Youth Liberation Front has in the past, however, retweeted several press reports, including ones that feature video footage of crowds of people in public places. On Nov. 21, the group retweeted video from the Spanish-language news agency CRN Noticias that claimed to show demonstrators going in and out of Guatemala’s Congress building after some set it on fire. On Nov. 7, PNW Youth Liberation Front retweeted an Oregon Public Broadcasting tweet that featured video of crowds celebrating the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in downtown Portland. The group did not immediately respond to tweets published Saturday evening asking whether it obtained permission from each person shown in the press videos to retweet them.
An apology
On Dec. 10, PNW Youth Liberation Front retweeted a video from KGW-TV news reporter Maggie Vespa, which featured an interview with Linneas Boland-Godbey, an activist at the “Red House” demonstration off North Mississippi Avenue. Vespa says she asked Boland-Godbey to condemn the incident involving Reaume and Peavyhouse.
“It will be disciplined,” he says before asking if Reaume is OK.
“Part of her nail got ripped off,” says Vespa.
“I did not know that,” Boland-Godbey says. “She’s so nice! All of us like her. She’s always here! No, seriously, sorry! But we are talking about it because that was not OK and those people are not going to be around.”
Longtime Portland activist Gregory McKelvey also commented on the situation in a series of tweets starting Dec. 8:
The Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school and research organization in Florida, addressed whether photographers should show protesters’ faces in June.
“Legally, there’s no question — when protesters are in public spaces engaged in newsworthy activity, visual journalists are well within their rights to document them,” the organization said in a blog entry. “But protesters fear potential retaliation when images become public.”
Donna De Cesare, a University of Texas professor who spent 20 years working as a freelance visual journalist, told Poynter, “The public has a right to know; we have a right to go out and take the pictures. But we also have to think about how our work impacts people’s lives. … I think when we’re making the image selections, we have to have these conversations. Is this something that could harm someone?”
Discrepancy Report editor-in-chief Joe Douglass worked as an investigative reporter and anchor for KATU-TV in Portland from April 2014 until September 2019 when he moved with his family to the East Coast.
