Twice this month alone, the RCMP has been publicly rebuked over how its members treat journalists and activists in environmental protests. The RCMP has shown again and again that it views journalists — particularly those who cover the environment, Indigenous issues or the police force itself — with utter contempt.
Yet this is the same police force the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission wants to task with designing an accreditation system for journalists. In a report issued last week, the commission slammed the police for arresting journalist Jerome Turner while he covered the Wet’suwet’en protests in northern B.C. for Ricochet Media. But in the next breath, the police watchdog made a troubling recommendation: that the RCMP develop a system for accreditation for journalists.
RCMP officers are demonstrably illiterate on the topic of journalists’ right to report, and seem unable to understand the role of journalists in a democratic society, as the repeated arrests and interference show. In case after case, journalists have been either acquitted by courts or the charges against them withdrawn, like in the case of Justin Brake, who was arrested in 2016 while covering protests over Labrador’s Muskrat Falls project for The Independent. The Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal ruled in Justin Brake’s favour in 2019.
Yet officers somehow remain ignorant of the law.
But try explaining that to them on a rural logging road, far from cell service, when the alternative to compliance is immediate arrest. I should know.
It’s a long drive to Fairy Creek from Victoria. So when I heard one morning in May of 2021 that the RCMP was about to swoop in and start arresting protesters there, I hit the road as soon as possible, taking only the time I needed to load up my camera and some snacks for the drive.
I pulled up about three hours later at a line of police tape, behind which were a handful of police vehicles and a couple officers.
I still have the recording of our interaction on my phone.
“I’m hoping to get through to the blockade,” I told the officer on the other side of the tape, after making it clear I’m a journalist.
“Nobody’s getting through today,” she replied. After a brief but polite argument, one of her colleagues stepped in and asked me for my “accreditation.”
There is no system for media accreditation in Canada. I said as much. I was at that time an editor at a local news company, a board member of the Canadian Association of Journalists, a journalism professor, and an award-winning journalist who reported on this exact topic. But that’s not what they wanted. They wanted credentials that do not exist.
Now the police oversight body wants the RCMP to create those credentials, seeming to believe the RCMP would be fair-minded, reasonable arbiters of such a system.
Giving Mounties the power to decide who is and is not a legitimate journalist is a non-starter.
The force is decidedly unsuitable for that task. Just ask Turner. Or World Press Photo Award winning-photographer Amber Bracken, who the RCMP arrested at Wet’suwet’en, despite the 2019 ruling that upheld journalists’ right to report even when injunctions bar protesters from an area, particularly in cases related to Indigenous land rights.
There is possibly no single body worse suited to deciding who is and is not a journalist than the RCMP. I would trust nine strangers at a bar to know what a journalist does, and why, before I trusted the RCMP with its long track record of interfering with us.
The real remedy to police arresting journalists is simple: police should just stop arresting journalists. The RCMP should also be trained on what journalists do, and what journalism is, and punished in serious ways when they violate our rights (or anyone’s). The Brake decision did not mention accreditation, saying instead that a person “engaged in apparent good faith in a news-gathering activity of a journalistic nature,” who meets other common-sense criteria should be allowed to report. It cast a broad net, as it should. The media landscape is in flux, and what a journalist looks like today is different from what one looked like a generation ago, and will probably change more in the coming decades.
After my experience at Fairy Creek, and that of so many other journalists, in 2021 several journalism outlets — including this one — took the RCMP to the B.C. Supreme Court to protect ourselves. The court ruled in our favour, lending yet another layer of legal cover for journalists reporting on protests. Justice Thompson wrote, “I am not satisfied that geographically extensive exclusion zones, and associated access checkpoints, have been justified as reasonably necessary in order to give the police the space they need.”
The police have the space they need to do their jobs safely. Now the police need to give journalists some space to do ours.
Comments
Don't-Mourn-Organize, etc.
Journalists don't have to create a licensing body, the way that accounting and medicine have. You can't have to have a license to practise journalism.
But journalists could form a "professional standards body" to promote, well, just that. You just get a bunch of them together, enough to be noticed, write up a code of conduct. Have frequent meetings to discuss particularly good or bad examples of journalism, and throw out bouquets for well-done work, and brickbats for propaganda dressed up as claimed facts.
The icky bit comes when you refuse to let people/organizations join because of the brickbats. At that point, it becomes "controversial" because it won't let in Rebel News, and other propagandists. Tell them to set up their own organization.
The RCMP can let in journalists and propagandists by recognizing both, but the moment it buys into ANY journalistic organization, they've ceded control of the journalist decision. Probably with relief.