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In U.S., Dangerous Misconceptions from TSA Poster

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

Back in 2004, Iraqi gunmen loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abducted U.S. freelance photographer Paul Taggert because, as they later told The Associated Press, they thought he was a spy. Now, a new poster from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration reinforces dangerous misconceptions by depicting a photographer as a terrorist.

“Don’t let our planes get into the wrong hands,” reads the poster’s caption beneath an image of a man holding a camera with a telescopic lens pointed through the chain-link fence of an airport. The poster comes a year after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano went on Fox News and urged viewers to be suspicious. “If they see, for example, somebody continually taking photographs of a piece of critical infrastructure that doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

The National Press Photographers Association sent a letter on Monday to Napolitano, asking her to order U.S. security authorities to remove the poster from display. “It is my understanding that airport administrators have been directed to post and prominently display this material around airports ‘one poster per entrance,'” stated NPPA General Counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher, who signed the letter. “I would have hoped that DHS and TSA would have been more sensitive to free speech concerns after your statement last year on Fox News regarding photography.”

Worldwide, photographers are regularly detained and harassed for doing their job. And that’s true in the United States as well. Lance Rosenfeld was on assignment this year for ProPublica and the PBS program “Frontline,” taking photographs related to the Gulf oil spill, when he fell under suspicion. Rosenfeld was detained in July near BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas by police and released only after authorities reviewed his images and collected his personal identification information, which they then shared with BP, the company whose off-shore drilling resulted in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

“In any free country, the balance between actual vigilance and overzealous enforcement is delicate,” the photographers association wrote last year to Napolitano. “It is one thing for DHS to act when there is probable cause; it is quite another to abuse that discretion in order to create a climate that chills free speech under the pretext of safety and security. It is our position that the material targeted at the general aviation community does just that.”

Hollman Morris, Labeled ‘Terrorist,’ Finally Harvard-bound

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Original Story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’  blog.

For a month, U.S. officials in Bogotá told Colombian journalist Hollman Morris that his request for a U.S. visa to study at Harvard as a prestigious Nieman Fellow had been denied on grounds relating to terrorist activities as defined by the U.S. Patriot Act, and that the decision was permanent and that there were no grounds for appeal. It was the first time in the storied history of the Nieman Foundation that a journalist had been prohibited from traveling not by his own nation, such as, say, South Africa’s apartheid regime back in 1960, but by ours, noted Nieman Curator Bob Giles in the Los Angeles Times.

A coalition of groups including the Nieman Foundation, Human Rights Watch, CPJ, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (where Morris was also a fellow), the Open Society Institute, the Knight Foundation, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the Inter-American Press Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center, the Washington Office on Latin America, and the North American Congress for Latin America rallied to Morris’ defense, publicly and privately imploring U.S. agencies to reverse the decision. Last week, the multilateral Organization of American States also asked the State Department to grant Morris the visa.

Morris wrote this afternoon in an e-mail to the above groups: “I just got out of the U.S. Embassy and they gave me the visa.” He went on: “I am very happy, and I know none of this would have been possible without you.”

CPJ and other groups are happy, too. Although the month-long denial of the visa raises questions that remain unanswered. Such as: Did U.S. officials accept information provided by their Colombian counterparts without independently verifying the claims? Did U.S. officials follow Colombia’s lead by (albeit temporarily) red-baiting one of Colombia’s most respected and critical journalists?

After news of the U.S. visa denial broke in Colombia, more than a few callers on radio and television talks threatened Morris’ life saying the U.S. decision was confirmation of his alleged “terrorist” ties.

This is a charge that has been levied against Morris before, by Colombian officials as high-ranking as President Alvaro Uribe, who has accused Morris of being “an accomplice of terrorism” over his reporting of the Colombia’s leftist guerrillas. But human rights groups suspect that senior Colombian officials have really lashed out at Morris over his reports on rightist paramilitary forces linked to senior Colombian government officials. At the same time, Morris was one of the Colombian journalists who was spied on and had phone calls and e-mails intercepted by Colombia’s Department of Administrative Security under the Uribe administration.

Morris has frequently visited the United States, including in 2007 when he received the Human Rights Defender Award from Human Rights Watch. Morris’ Nieman Fellowship at Harvard starts in the fall.

Global Media Forum Cites Risks of Environmental Reporting

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

He’s young, unemployed, and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn’t spent much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk’s description of chemical dumping into a brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air. That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.

The lines between journalism and blogging have never been blurrier, but the risks and challenges of reporting on environmental issues are clear. BP workers and U.S. Coast Guard personnel have denied access to photographers and camera crews trying to document the ongoing oil spill off shore of the U.S. coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. In many other nations, extreme and sometimes violent reprisals have been reported in the wake of stories on environmental degradation.

Before I tell you about the journalists who made it to the June 22 environmental panel at the third annual Global Media Forum, hosted by the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, I’d like to tell you about a few who were unable to travel. Few journalists have done more to document illegal logging and other encroachments on the Brazilian Amazon than Lúcio Flávio Pinto. But, in response to his stories, private companies, government officials, and other actors have filed more than 30 lawsuits against him in courts whose integrity is challenged. The point of the suits is to harass, if not drive him into bankruptcy, says Pinto who turned down the invitation to join the panel in Germany. If he were to leave Brazil for even a few days, he explained, he might fail to respond to a judge’s unexpected ruling and thereby lose a case seeking damages.

Another potential panelist just couldn’t physically travel. Mikhael Beketov was a Russian reporter who criticized the local government’s plans to deforest an area in order to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was later found in a coma lying in the garden of his home, at least a day and a half after assailants broke his skull, smashed his fingers, broken his legs, and left him in the freezing cold. One leg and several fingers were later amputated. Elsewhere, environmental journalists in Guinea and Bulgaria have been threatened; journalist Joey Estriber was abducted by unidentified men in the Philippines, never to be seen again.

But one thing that all the panelists in Bonn made clear is that subtle forms of pressure can also silence environmental reporters. Liu Jiangiang is one of China’s few journalists whose stories have led authorities to suspend if not stop dams and other construction projects with potential environmental consequences. He explained that the unwritten rules about what is and is not permitted in China may change without warning, and that pressure often comes from hidden sources to communicate “don’t do that again.”

Elsewhere in Asia, however, the environment is still seen as a minor concern. Rena Saeed Khan writes the weekly “Earthly Matters” column for Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily. She told a packed room in Bonn that terrorist bombings still make the front page in Pakistani papers, and that climate change or other environmental stories make page two at best–even though, she added, there is sometimes a connection between them. There is a nexus between militants and what Khan called the “timber mafia” in the nation’s northwest tribal areas. She also warned that in South Asia, like on several other continents, stories about competition over dwindling water supplies are looming.

In Haiti, it’s not the water but plastic water bottles that are adding to the country’s growing waste in the wake of the January earthquake, according to relief agency sources. Roosevelt Jean Francois is the leader of a community-minded journalist organization called CECOSIDA that promotes leadership development and training on reporting health, environmental and other matters. He noted that one yet untold effect of the relief efforts is the corruption, especially among local officials, over controlling distribution of foreign aid. Francois also noted that Haitian journalists covering any sensitive matter operate in an environment where reporters enjoy little protection against threats and violent reprisals.

Environmental reporters are more often silenced quietly through economic pressure, noted Jean François Julliard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. The pressure may be so great on traditional journalists, noted Julliard, that bloggers may emerge as the chroniclers doing the best reporting. By then I had already underscored to the audience that RSF, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, had issued a report on the myriad risks of environmental reporting worldwide.

The case of the young Egyptian blogger, Tamer Mabrouk, illustrated the point. He not only got fined for his online exposés, including documents and photographs of dumping by Trust Chemicals Company into Manzala Lake. He lost his job at the factory, too.

This blog is dedicated to colleague and friend Persephone Miel, a champion of press freedom, kindness, and humor.

‘Crude’ Filmmaker’s Raw Footage Subject to Subpoena

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

A filmmaker’s raw footage is much like a photographer’s unedited images or a reporter’s notebooks—a private record of their reporting that is rarely disclosed to others. On Thursday, a federal judge in New York ruled that a private firm could subpoena the unedited footage used to make a news documentary. The reason? To help the company defend itself against a lawsuit.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan quoted an adage from 20th century Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” The New York federal judge went on to write that allowing the firm to review the filmmaker’s outtakes “will contribute to the goal of seeing not only that justice is done, but that it appears to be done.”

The irony in the judge’s choice of language is as thick as crude. The raw footage from “Crude,” a documentary called “thorough and dispassionate,” by The New York Times, is now vulnerable to a subpoena by Chevron. “Crude” investigates alleged health and environmental degradation resulting from oil extraction by Texaco, now owned by Chevron, in Ecuador. The company is being sued by Ecuadorans for millions of dollars in damages in [Ecuador], and “Crude” is the documentary shot largely in Ecuador to tell their story.

What would the late Supreme Court Justice Brandeis think? He made his famous sunlight statement about the need to expose bankers and investors who controlled “money trusts” to stifle competition, and he later railed against not only powerful corporations but the lawyers and other members of the bar who worked to perpetuate their power.

“Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of the ‘corporation lawyer,’ and far too little of the ‘people’s lawyer,’” he said in a 1905 speech before the Harvard Ethical Society.

Judge Kaplan’s ruling this week means that the independent filmmaker Joe Berlinger who made “Crude,” may have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage to Chevron, which Forbes lists as the third largest U.S. corporation.

“We’re obviously very surprised at the court’s lack of sensitivity to the journalist’s privilege,” the filmmaker’s lawyer, Maura J. Wogan, told The New York Times. “The decision really threatens grave harm to documentary filmmakers and investigative reporters.”

In Oakland, Progress in Bailey Murder Prosecution

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

The murderers of journalists around the globe presume they won’t get caught. Unfortunately, they’re often right: Only one case in 10 results in any convictions; just one in 20 results in convictions of those who ordered the murder. For more than a year it seemed like the August 2007 slaying of U.S. journalist Chauncey Bailey might not result in the prosecution of all those involved, including the suspected mastermind. Now, however, due largely to the persistence of Bailey’s Bay Area colleagues, an indictment of suspects, including the alleged mastermind, may come soon.

The expected indictments are based in part on the ongoing grand jury testimony by one man who, for the past 20 months has been the only suspect charged with the murder. His statements to authorities have been reported by The San Francisco Chronicle as well as a group of journalists known as the Chauncey Bailey Project that was formed in the wake of the murder. Last week both outlets also reported that Oakland, California police authorities, including the lead detective on the case and two of his superiors, have come under administrative investigation.

The killers of journalists in many less developed nations often work in collusion with corrupt government officials, CPJ research has long shown. For more than a year irregularities in the Oakland police investigation into the murder of one of the Bay area’s most respected community journalists rivaled the botched or compromised murder investigations in nations from Mexico to Mozambique.

Take Sgt. Derwin Longmire, the homicide detective in the Bailey murder case. The Oakland Police Department assigned him to lead the investigation, even though his superiors knew the detective was closely associated with a man then suspected of multiple crimes, Yusuf Bey IV, and whom a grand jury is now considering indicting on charges of ordering the journalist’s murder.

“It’s unusual but not unethical,” then-Assistant Chief Howard Jordan told Anderson Cooper of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” in February 2008. In an interview today with CPJ, Jordan said he has reconsidered his position.

“The allegations as to Sgt. Longmire were not [then] available,” now-Acting Chief Jordan told CPJ. “I felt he was the best officer for the job,” he added. “I have changed my position on that.”

Sgt. Longmire and two of his superior officers, Lt. Ersie Joyner, the former head of the homicide unit, and Deputy Chief Jeff Loman are each under administrative investigation, Jordan told CPJ. All three officers face possible disciplinary action for their handling or supervision of the Bailey murder case.

Grand jury indictments are expected soon, and they may include Bey. In testimony before the grand jury this week, gunman Devaughndre Broussard said he committed the killing at the behest of Bey, his boss at an Oakland establishment called “Your Black Muslim Bakery,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Broussard,” Jordan told CPJ, “is affirming the things that we’ve suspected all along.”

Then why did it take more than 20 months to finally prepare a case against him? “We’ve said that Mr. Bey is a suspect,” Jordan said. “But we didn’t have enough information then to charge Mr. Bey.”

Jordan declined comment on other irregularities in the Oakland police investigation, many of which were brought to light by journalists reporting for the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Broussard was part of the kitchen crew of “Your Black Muslim Bakery,” an Oakland establishment that Bey, 23, inherited from his late father. The bakery’s ownership and staff have long been linked through felony convictions and press reports to crimes including extortion, fraud, car theft, sexual abuse of minors, assault, and murder. Bey was already wanted on various felony charges and was under police surveillance at the time of Bailey’s murder. Bailey was investigating the finances of the bakery at the time of his death.

This week, Broussard told the grand jury that Bey ordered him to take sole responsibility for the Bailey murder, according to Broussard’s attorney, La Rue Grim, who was quoted in the Chronicle. Broussard had previously confessed to the crime but said he had acted alone. Now Broussard is negotiating a plea agreement for his different roles in murdering the journalist and two other men, the Chauncey Bailey Project reported. The grand jury is weighing whether to indict Bey along with another young man associated with the bakery, Antoine Mackey, in Bailey’s murder. Bey’s attorney, Anne Beles, told the Chronicle that Bey had nothing to do with the murder. Mackey has yet to respond to news reports about his alleged involvement.

Chauncey Bailey had just been promoted to editor of the Post Newspaper Group, a consortium of African-American-owned weekly newspapers focusing on the Bay area’s black communities when he was shot dead one morning on the way to his office. Immediately after, police raided the bakery and arrested Bey and other suspects on unrelated charges of kidnapping and assault, including the torture of women. But police charged only Broussard in Bailey’s murder.

Sgt. Longmire then did something that, on the face of it, seems highly irregular. The homicide detective put the murder suspect, Broussard, in a closed interrogation room with his former boss, Bey, then incarcerated on other charges. Sgt. Longmire allowed the two suspects to speak to each other alone without recording their conversation.

The police action seems even odder in the face of other evidence uncovered by Bailey’s colleagues. The Chauncey Bailey Project obtained Bey’s cell phone records, reporting that they show that Bey made a series of calls to his bakery associates and others within minutes of Bailey’s murder. The project also reported that other police detectives investigating crimes prior to Bailey’s murder had placed a tracking device on Bey’s car, and that the device placed the car outside Bailey’s apartment building the night before his murder.

For more than a year, however, Oakland police charged only Broussard with the crime, suggesting that he murdered Bailey on his own. Only in response to a series of investigative reports by the Chauncey Bailey Project did the police finally admit, in November 2008, that they had suspected Bey of being involved in the murder “within the first 24 hours of our investigation.”

The evidence produced by the project and other Bay-area news outlets included a video of Bey speaking with other suspects associated with the bakery in a different interrogation room in a nearby police department. The video was recorded by the San Leandro Police Department just four days after Bailey’s murder. On it, Bey says he put the gun used to kill Bailey in his closet after the shooting. He mocks the fatal blast to the journalist’s head. He boasts that Longmire was protecting him from being charged, and that together he and Longmire decided to blame Broussard alone for the murder. Bey later said in an interview, according to the project, that he made up stories to mislead police in the interrogation room conversation captured on video.

Last November, in response to reporting by the project, both the city of Oakland and the state of California opened separate oversight investigations into the Oakland Police Department’s murder investigation. Longmire was also removed from the case and reassigned to patrol duty, according to recent news reports. The head of the homicide unit, Lt. Ersie Joyner, was also removed from the unit and put on patrol duty.

Acting Chief Jordan told CPJ that Lt. Joyner’s transfer from the homicide unit was “part of an overall transfer of lieutenants” within the department and that it had nothing to do with the Bailey murder investigation.

Longmire was put on paid leave last week while he is under administrative investigation, Jordan said. Deputy Chief Loman has been on paid leave since February on unrelated charges of sexual harassment.

Tunisia Caucus Co-Chair Calls Despot Moderate and Wise

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Betty McCollum told her constituents she was going to honor the dead. “Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN) will spend the Fourth of July holiday visiting the North African Cemetery and Memorial in Tunisia to pay tribute to American troops, including 138 Minnesotans, who lost their lives in World War II,” reads a July 1 statement on her website. “It is an honor for me to have the opportunity to pay tribute to these courageous men on behalf of Minnesotans and the nation.”

But the state-run Tunisian press agency reported something else. The next day, on July 2, Rep. McCollum met with the Tunisian Foreign Minister, Abdelwaheb Abdallah, in Tunis. “The Foreign Minister briefed his guest about the comprehensive development work carried out in Tunisia, under the impulse of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and stressed Tunisia’s will to further reinforce its relations with the United States, highlighting the role [of the] ‘Tunisia Caucus’ in strengthening these relations,” reads a Tunis-Afrique Presse news agency report.

“Mrs. McCollum affirmed, in turn, that ‘Tunisia holds a strategic position between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and it represents the voice of moderation and wisdom in the world, a voice we must listen to,’” according to the Tunisian state news report.

McCollum’s chief of staff Bill Harper later clarified to the Committee to Protect Journalists (www.cpj.org) that she made this remark in the context of foreign policy, and, in particular, Tunisia’s advice more than five years ago to the United States. While long cooperating with Washington in the war on terror, Tunisia earlier in this decade (quietly) opposed the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. “The premise of her visit was security,” he explained.

But Iraq was not mentioned in the Tunisian government news report about McCollum’s visit. Instead, the Tunis-Afrique Presse agency went on, “The meeting allowed as well to highlight the role of [the] ‘Tunisia Caucus,’ a group within the U.S. House of Representatives including congressmen who want to learn more about Tunisia, its culture, traditions, history, and people and to further strengthen bilateral relations.”

Apparently the bipartisan Tunisia Caucus has little or no interest in learning about, or even acknowledging, Tunisia’s abysmal record on press freedom and human rights. The so-called moderate and wise leader, President Ben Ali, is a dictator who has monopolized power for no less than 21 years. He runs Tunisia as a police state, where the country’s large, Soviet-style press does little more than laud the despot and his tight-fisted regime.

Only a handful of Internet publications and small-circulation opposition papers have attempted to seriously criticize the government or hold it accountable. But journalists writing for these outlets have been placed under surveillance, assaulted by plainclothes police, had their phone and Internet lines cut, and been prevented from leaving the country. Enough have been imprisoned since 2001 to make Tunisia the Arab world’s worst nation for jailing journalists.

Of course, Tunisia’s admirers are right to point out that it is a highly secular as well as modern nation. Not only does it have a literate population, but one in which women largely enjoy the same rights as men. The sunny Mediterranean state is also one that has little or no history of ethnic or sectarian strife. No wonder the nation seems like a natural “friend,” as U.S. diplomats prefer to call it, if not ally of the United States.

But members of Congress seeking to strengthen such ties should neither sidestep nor dismiss Tunisia’s utter lack of democratic rights and norms. Unfortunately, McCollum is hardly the first to do so. Earlier this year, the other Tunisia Caucus co-chair, Rep. Bud Cramer, Jr. (D-AL), went to Tunis where he also pledged to strengthen bilateral relations without mentioning either press freedom or human rights. The Tunis-Afrique Presse agency quoted Cramer saying, “He voiced his readiness to exert more influence…to better publicize the opportunities offered by Tunisia so as to hoist bilateral co-operation to higher levels.”

Cramer’s press officer Jennie Gibson did not return calls asking for comment.

Nor should members of Congress allow their statements to be used for propaganda by a police state. On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East Program Coordinator Joel Campagna wrote an op-ed (http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_9962056) about McCollum’s recent visit to Tunis in The St. Paul Pioneer Press, her hometown paper. McCollum has yet to respond to the op-ed. Her press officer, Cleve Mesidor, also did not return calls asking for comment for this blog.

Other members of the Tunisia Caucus include Rep. Mark S. Kirk (R-IL), Ben Chandler (D-KY), Henry E. Brown, Jr. (R-SC), and Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz (D-TX).

Note: CPJ is a worldwide watchdog that accepts no government funds as it defends the rights of journalists everywhere to report the news without fear of reprisal.

By Committee to Protect Journalists Washington Rep. Frank Smyth

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Politics .

The Local Newsman – A CPJ Special Report By Frank Smyth

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists website

OAKLAND, California–The newsman was hard to forget. He carried a handheld camera to record interviews. While on the cell phone, he scribbled notes on yellow Post-its, sticking them one by one up his arm. He asked not only the first, but often the toughest question at many press conferences. He invariably wore a collared shirt and tie even when taking a homeless man to breakfast, as he had done the August 2 morning he was gunned down three blocks from his office at the Post Newspaper Group, an African-American-owned consortium of local weeklies focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area’s black communities.

The brazen daylight murder of Chauncey Bailey may seem like an aberration because it happened in the United States. But his case looks a lot like the hundreds of other journalist slayings that have occurred around the world in the past 15 years.

Much like Bailey, most journalists killed on the job are local reporters digging into corruption and crime. Bailey was by all accounts fearless in pursuing such stories.

“Chauncey didn’t believe in alluding to anything,” his publisher, Paul Cobb, told CPJ in an interview at the offices of the Oakland Post. “He went right to it.”

Moreover, the murder of a journalist in the United States, though rare over the past decade, is not as unusual as one might think. (Two U.S. journalists were among those who died while on duty in 2001: one in the World Trade Center attacks and the other in an anthrax attack.) Between 1976 and 1993, 12 journalists were assassinated in the United States. Ten out of the 12 were immigrant journalists reporting in their first language (Vietnamese, French, Chinese, or Spanish) to immigrant communities, and all but a few of those murders remain unsolved.

One murder that was prosecuted was that of Don Bolles, a reporter for the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic who died in a car bomb explosion in 1976. This watershed crime drew other reporters from around the nation to Phoenix, where they reported literally in the murdered journalist’s tracks. Not only did their combined coverage help authorities convict a mob-linked contractor in Bolles’ murder, but their act of solidarity also led to the formation of the nonprofit advocacy group Investigative Reporters and Editors. Ongoing coverage of the Bailey murder by the late newsman’s own Oakland Post (Bailey had just been promoted to editor-in-chief of this and other Post newspapers), along with reporting by The Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, and other media outlets, may have already contributed to the Oakland Police Department’s investigation. One suspect is in custody, and authorities have said they are investigating possible accomplices. Still, critics such as Cobb maintain that authorities have failed to cover all angles, including interviewing at least one eyewitness.

The suspect in custody, Devaughndre Broussard, helped cook and clean at Your Black Muslim Bakery, a one-time hub of Oakland community activism whose surviving owners and staff have since been tied to various criminal activities–including charges filed after the murder that involve the alleged kidnapping and torture of two women in May. Broussard allegedly confessed to shooting Bailey, although his attorney has since maintained the purported confession was made under duress. Broussard reportedly said he was motivated by Bailey’s ongoing investigations of the bakery’s finances and other activities, a story of importance to the local community but one that had drawn the attention of few other news outlets.

The slaying–three shots fired from a sawed-off shotgun, across the street from a day care center and next to the parking lot of the main public library–shocked a community in which Bailey, a twice-divorced father of a 13-year-old son, lived and worked. “His ethos was anything and everything black,” Cobb said, adding that Bailey was dogged no matter whether he was investigating allegations about a local drug dealer or a pimping policeman.

He was hardest, perhaps, on politicians. “One thing stands out: He was always there,” Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums told an overflowing crowd at Bailey’s funeral. “Whether he was the lone journalist on a sunny spring Saturday in Oakland, watching several hundred children participate in a track meet, or in a large media event, there he was–camera in one hand, tape recorder in another, listening carefully, asking the first question, setting the tone.”

Cobb reminded fellow journalists at a memorial dinner for the slain newsman that there is still work to be done. He urged reporters to keep close tabs on the ongoing police investigation of the murder, and to make individual and collective efforts to continue covering stories of importance to the community. That was Bailey’s trademark and the reason he was so widely respected.

Frank Smyth, CPJ’s journalist security coordinator, helped create CPJ’s database of all journalist deaths since 1992.