Last month, Seth Stern, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote an op-ed for the Asheville Citizen-Times, in North Carolina, raising the alarm about an imminent trial in the city that had mostly slipped under the radar of the national press: that of Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss, two reporters with the Asheville Blade, another outlet in the city, who were arrested on Christmas Day in 2021 while covering the police clearing of a homeless encampment. They were charged with trespassing; Bliss’s phone was also seized. “Authoritarian regimes often put journalists on trial for doing their jobs, but it’s rare in the United States,” Stern wrote. “It seems like the sole purpose of these charges is to send a message to the journalists who told Asheville residents how their police department chose to spread Christmas cheer.”
Origen: The concentric circles of press threats in America – Columbia Journalism Review
