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Huffington Post: St. Paul in the Hot Seat Over Journalist Arrests (9/5/08) by Timothy Karr
The refusal of Mayor Chris Coleman of RNC host city St.Paul, Minn., to address media reform activist Karr's "repeated calls and e-mails" does little to assuage Karr's concerns "that journalists were specifically targeted by authorities" there:On Thursday, the final night of the convention, it appears that authorities ratcheted up their attacks on both protesters and credentialed journalists, lobbing tear gas and percussion grenades into crowds and arresting student journalists, local TV photographers, Associated Press reporters, and two MyFox journalists, among others. Other journalists have also been pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were held at gunpoint during a "pre-emptive" raid aimed at disrupting protesters last weekend.
Karr relates how concerned people and non-incarcerated journalists delivered "60,000 letters"—which "were collected in less than 72 hours"—to St. Paul's City Hall, where fellow activist Nancy Doyle Brown explained how, "tragically, there are stories that the world needed to hear this week that will never be told" because "reporters working on them were sitting in the back of squad cars, were stripped of their cameras, or were face down on the pavement with their hands cuffed behind their backs."
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