The world was watching...

Des Moines journalist on trial

To: Substack Readers

From: Julie Gammack

Re: Guest Column by Rekha Basu

Today I am reprinting a column by Rekha Basu with her permission (click here for the previous column about our friendship). We have been glued to the live stream of the trial of Rekha’s colleague, journalist Andrea Sahouri and are relieved to report the jury delivered a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict on all counts yesterday.

Rekha Basu

Rekha Basu, The Des Moines Register

It was a coincidence that Derek Chauvin’s trial in Minneapolis opened the same week as Andrea Sahouri’s trial in Des Moines, a cascading ripple of indirect causes and effects and of injustices involving interactions between police and civilians.

Had Chauvin, the then-Minneapolis police officer, not pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for more than seven minutes, the 46-year-old Black man would not have died in what the Hennepin County medical examiner called a homicide — all over a $20 misdemeanor. And had Floyd, in the process of dying, not been recorded on video pleading, “I can't breathe," a year of Black Lives Matter protests might not have ignited across the nation. Nor would, Sahouri, a 2019 Columbia University journalism school graduate, have informally picked up The Des Moines Register’s created-on-the-fly protest beat early in her career at the newspaper.

It was that assignment that put the energetic Palestinian-American journalist at the scene of a Merle Hay Mall-area protest last May 31 that turned violent. She was, as she would try to tell Luke Wilson, the police officer who arrested her, just doing her job. That meant interviewing people, taking photos, and tweeting the unfolding events up to and after she herself became the story.

Sahouri was charged with failure to disperse and interference with official actsafter the officer claimed she ignored orders to the crowd to leave the area. Sahouri testified she didn’t hear the orders, and judging from the cacophony emanating from a recording of the scene entered as evidence, it would have been hard to. As Wilson raced toward her, Sahouri testified, “I put up my hands and said, ‘I’m press. I’m press.'” She can be seen on video repeating those comments after being detained. “He grabbed me and pepper-sprayed me and said, ‘That’s not what I asked.’” She was arrested and loaded into a police van, where she continued to document what was happening into her phone's camera.

A Polk County jury Wednesday found her not guilty of either charge.

The question is, why would Polk County Attorney John Sarcone send a case with so little evidence to trial in the first place? 

Trial live stream from Drake University

Sahouri had witnesses who were with her and supported her testimony. They also had video and photos. Her arresting officer didn’t even turn on his video camera, as is required, or try to recapture the footage later, as is required by Des Moines Police Department policy.

Watching her pleading for help while her eyes are burning so much that, she later said, she feared going blind, one is haunted by an eerie sense of déjà vu from Floyd's tape: another person of color rendered helpless, appealing for mercy in a needlessly aggressive encounter with police.

Sahouri was one of six journalists from the USA TODAY Network to be detained or arrested covering Black Lives Matter protests last year.  But Sahouri was the first working U.S. journalist since 2018 whose case went to trial. And the fact that it did is almost as alarming as the fact that Chauvin’s trial is only the fourth in Minnesota history in which an officer is tried for killing a civilian on the job. It's the first time a white officer is tried for killing a Black person in that state. 

Nationally, 128 journalists were arrested for doing their jobs last year, according to Press Freedom Tracker. Those arrests and prosecutions have a chilling effect on the press’s ability to do its job. Such cases take time, money and an emotional toll on defendants. Not all may be employed full time or have the support of their management, which Sahouri had. Fortunately, it took little time for a jury to recognize the holes in the prosecutors' case.

But something that came up at trial is still nagging me. There were thinly veiled insinuations that Sahouri may have been too close to the protesters. After the jury verdict, Sarcone was blatant, telling The Washington Post, "This is about someone who had no credentials on her... being a part of the protests. Which is fine... but it's an hour and a half after the dispersal order was given."   

I wonder if he would have raised the question about, say, a white man with an American surname covering protesters of color. Several times, the prosecution made reference to her being in the center of crowds as if that would be improper. Both Sahouri and Register executive editor Carol Hunter were asked on the witness stand how they avoid bias in news coverage, or whether reporters believe they can disobey the law.  

Reporters of color, of course, share an aversion to racial bias, but we're professional enough to know when our job demands keeping our feelings to ourselves. Having been through the same journalism school from which Sahouri graduated, I know how rigorously fledgling journalists are trained in ethics, conflicts of interests and the dangers of getting too close to a source. Still, for minority journalists, it can be a no-win situation. If you cover a community like yours, you might gain its trust because of the similarities you share. But then you might be accused of getting too close to sources.

Reporters can and must strive for objectivity all the time by interviewing people on various sides of an issue. But the stories a journalist chooses to cover, the people he or she seeks out to question, and the questions asked will, invariably, be personal judgment calls.

For a long time, some news operations wouldn’t send correspondents to cover assignments in the countries of their birth, as if they would be inherently biased in their favor. In fact, as they've since learned, it could be an advantage to have someone who understands the culture and institutions and speaks the language. 

So I return to this: Why does it raise questions when a reporter of color is assigned to cover people of color fighting racial injustice, yet it's not considered a conflict for white, male American reporters to be embedded with U.S. troops to cover a foreign war we're fighting? Would it be preferable to have only white people cover Black people? What about vice versa?

I think we've all got some reflecting to do on these issues — especially the law enforcement community and prosecutors. But right now I need to get on with something else: I've got a celebration to plan for my co-worker and friend, Andrea, who spent nearly a year under needless pressure, conducting herself with professionalism and class. Rekha Basu, rbasu@registermedia.com