Actually they had been filming continuously, and they had been previously told by police to stand where they were standing, and they had received no new instructions from the police since then, and there was an all-white group of reporters standing in a similar position on the other side of the police who did not get arrested. I understand the desire to come up with an explanation for what happened, I really do, but the fact of the matter is that police arrested these reporters for no reason.

While it may be tempting to jump to a racial interpretation of the arrest, it appears that the CNN reporters were just standing in the wrong place and in the chaos of the moment were arrested.

> and in the chaos of the moment were arrested

What chaos? The scene shown in the video looks really calm, with one protester, several reporters, and a very large number of police standing around apparently doing nothing more than looking intimidating at that moment.

Perhaps chaos isn't the best word. Hightened tension is more appropriate.

Heightened tension is not an excuse to arrest someone. Police (in theory) exist to lower tension, not add to it.

You have just scolded the above commenter for jumping to a racial interpretation, and then jumped to an opposite conclusion yourself, on the basis of no evidence.

I hope that anyone seeing this situation and thinking, “I’m not sure how race plays into this,” will go back and learn some more about the history of race in America. I think a good starting place is the podcast “1619” which does a really good job investigating where racial problems in America came from.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.htm...

Perhaps it’s naïve of me to think people will want to learn about what it really means to be Black in America. But I think if you really listen to what history is saying and really listen to what Black people are experiencing right now it will change how you think about events like this.

Ah yes, the NYT is fake news but we should trust a Wikipedia article that is in the process of being deleted because it is fabricated.

The New York Times appears to me and many others misguided on the issue of race.

The 1776 Wikipedia page does not appear to be slated for deletion, I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

It says it on the talk page.

When a group of white people and a group with a black person are doing the exact same thing (reporting for cable news), positioned equidistant on opposite sides of a group of police offers and one group gets arrested and the other does not, how is that not racism? It is literally a natural experiment with a single variable (race) changed.

You're assuming that a single variable is being changed, but the far more likely explanation is that, given the high complexity of the situation, there are some other variables that you're not accounting for.

What variables?

The 1776 project is the epitome of the very propaganda you're talking about.

There were never ordered to move, it's all captured on film in that video. When the reporter asked "why am I being arrested?" the cop refused to even answer.

Everyone was ordered to move out of the area. They were asking for specific instructions on where to move to and didn't get them because there was no answer to that--the police didn't want them out of the way, they wanted the whole crowd gone.

The other CNN crew was told that they were fine where they were. The press were absolutely allowed to be there.

Yeah, not to pile on... but you're being downvoted because what you say is simply false.