This archive report was first published on 17 June 2020.
June 17, 2020
As I watched police officers arrest and physically strike journalists in Minneapolis, Washington DC, and New York, memories of my own attack resurfaced. Not since the 1960s has the Press been embroiled in so much violence on American streets.
Police brutality is familiar to me from my experience as a reporter in Kenya decades ago, but I had never witnessed it in America. A reporter lost an eye after she was hit by rubber bullets in Minneapolis. Eight journalists have been killed this year, says the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has been kept busy defending the First Amendment in the US, barely getting time to worry about threats to press freedom elsewhere. I should know, as a young reporter in Kenya in the early 1990s, CPJ came to my defence when police firebombed our offices at Society magazine on Moi Avenue, Nairobi, and arrested three editors.
As a Kenyan journalist, I am reminded of the fragility of democracy and the stark warning for Kenyans to safeguard against the encroachment of totalitarianism. “We can’t stop paying attention and, most important, calling attention to the importance of press freedom,” says Francine Prose, a former president of PEN.
As writers, we remember even the slightest of incidents, just as Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said. That should keep us from resting on our laurels. We should be appalled by the attacks on journalists and the Trump administration’s decision to teargas peaceful protestors, an egregious breech of constitutional rights.
