Mayor Bloomberg's First Amendment Problem

Since the beginning of his crackdown against the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has gone to great lengths to present himself as a champion of the First Amendment. But the free speech rhetoric coming from City Hall hasn't matched the brutal reality journalists have experienced on the front lines of the protest.

In the two months since the movement began, 26 journalists covering OWS events across the country have been arrested. More than half of these arrests have occurred in New York City, where 12 journalists were arrested in the last week alone.

My colleague Josh Stearns, who maintains a running tally of media arrests and harassment, said that the NYPD's early morning raids on Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15 resulted in the "single worst day for journalist attacks and arrests to date."

"From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals," Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement following the raids, "guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters' First Amendment rights."

The mayor is less clear regarding the rights of reporters covering the Occupy movement.

The NYPD has worked in coordination with other police departments around the country to prevent journalists from covering Occupy evictions. News crews, reporters and photographers have been herded away during police actions in Oakland, Portland and New York City.

Police have kettled others into "Free Speech Zones" — barricaded and controlled areas where journalists are kept far from the action.

Mayor Bloomberg said the police kept the media at a distance "to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press." But according to the New York Times, one journalist told a police officer "I'm press!" and the officer responded "Not tonight."

Many journalists who remained on the front lines were arrested, roughed up, tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed. New York police put a New York Post journalist in a choke hold, hit and forced Daily Caller reporter Michelle Fields to the ground, and struck Lucy Kafanov of RT with a baton. Many other members of the press have been shoved and harassed. In October, Kafanov reported that the NYPD was using high-powered strobe lights to blind cellphone cameras and block people from recording police actions.

On Friday, the mayor's office disputed our account of these violent arrests and harassment. His spokesman Stu Loeser tried to dismiss the importance of the police arrests, saying that only five of the journalists arrested had NYPD-issued press credentials.

But a great number of journalists working in New York City, including myself, don't bother to submit ourselves to the NYPD's Kafka-esque credentialing process. Others don't recognize the NYPD's authority to determine who qualifies as a working journalist and who does not. It's likely the credentialing process itself would not survive a First Amendment challenge.

In any event, one NYPD detective told Wired that the department doesn't intend to provide any press passes to journalists wishing to cover the Occupy movement.

All of this confusion about credentialing points to profound problems with the ways City Hall regards the media. As the former head of a press organization, Mayor Bloomberg should know better.

Before he again wraps himself in the First Amendment, New York's mayor needs to fully account for how the NYPD has trampled journalists’ free-speech rights.

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