Reporter arrests

Radio host Amy Goodman and two Democracy Now! producers were arrested Monday while covering a protest of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. According to a news release by the show, all three were later released; Goodman was charged with obstruction while Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar face riot charges.

An ABC producer was arrested Wednesday while trying to film Democratic officials and corporate donors from a sidewalk outside a Denver hotel, the network said.

Don't want to speak too soon, but on this last day of the Democratic National Convention it seems the events in Denver have unfolded minus the tense drama of waves of journalists swept into masses of detained protesters that marked the 2004 convention in New York City.

Indeed, the Reporters Committee hotline -- staffed in Denver by the law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, L.L.P., to provide journalists with free legal assistance -- has recorded exactly zero calls so far.

As foreign athletes, sports fans and hordes of journalists look toward home with the closing of the Olympics this weekend, free-press advocates are assessing how reporters have fared in and around Beijing. 

To the global nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, it was a "disaster."

The International Olympic Committee will investigate censorship of the Internet service of reporters covering the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, Reuters reported.

A reporter covering the flood in Des Moines was arrested Saturday morning on charges of trespassing and interference with official acts.

Two executives with the Phoenix New Times have filed a notice of intent to sue the county for $15 million over their arrests last year, after they reported on a grand jury investigation -- which itself was conducted to find information about a story in the newpaper.

Roberto Lima, editor of the Brazilian (N.J.) Voice, filed suit against the Newark police department on Tuesday, charging that police violated his constitutional right to free speech and the state’s shield law. 

A San Francisco radio host and would-be author has been charged with distributing child pornography, but he says he was doing research for a book on the subject. That may be, but journalists need to know that courts are generally not going to recognize the argument that the First Amendment right to gather and report the news includes the right to break the law in doing so.

Bill Lawson offers a harrowing first-person account of his arrest earlier this week while covering a residential house fire for the Maumelle [Ark.] Monitor. In it, Lawson complains of being roughed up by a state trooper and describes his experience as “abusive” and “downright scary.”