Abstract
This article examines shifts in one marker of professionalism for journalists as reflected in the police press pass system. Credentials can be interpreted both as a mark of occupational membership and as token that grants journalists access. Based on a census of 100 American police departments and interviews with representatives from those departments, we find that police credentialing policies are changing, in part because the new media environment has blurred journalism’s professional boundaries. Our analysis draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which suggests that institutional practices such as police department credentialing reproduce social hierarchies and power structures. Using this lens, we argue that credentials are losing their value as professional status symbols while becoming increasingly important for geophysical access.
While on his way home from dinner in suburban Maryland in 2011, wire service photographer Mannie Garcia noticed a pair of police officers working a case along the road. In keeping with professional habit, he pulled out his camera and took video and stills of the scene. One of the officers confronted Garcia and an altercation ensued. Garcia was injured, arrested on a disorderly conduct charge, and his camera’s memory chip confiscated. Eventually, he was acquitted of all charges, but as his case moved through the courts, he could not work for a living. Garcia’s White House Press credential was suspended because of the pending case, and without his permanent ‘hard-pass’, he was essentially suspended without pay (MacDonald, 2012; Winslow, 2012).
While Garcia’s case is extreme, it is a useful illustration for highlighting some of the salient issues concerning the complicated system of credentialing, journalistic practice, and police coverage. Garcia’s status as a professional journalist and White House ‘insider’ did nothing to help him during his confrontation on the highway. Legally, he did not even need a credential; he was working within a court-sanctioned First Amendment right to film police activity in public but was arrested, assaulted, and had to relinquish his equipment.
This project represents a theoretical examination of police credential policies, their role in constructing and maintaining relationships with journalists, and how policies are changing in the new media environment. We draw from a project conducted between 2013 and 2015, a census of 100 US police departments cataloguing their credentialing practices. As we collected that information, a small trend caught our attention: eight of the larger cities, including places like Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Detroit, had dropped their credentialing programs in recent years, and a few others shifted credentialing responsibilities to other entities. At the same time, while local government press passes may be less common, credentials for access to other news venues, such as political campaigns, stadium concerts, and sporting events, remain as important as ever – especially for visual journalists.
Background and theoretical foundation
A ticket in the hatband is often used as a simple iconic visual to mark a reporter in classic cartoons and movies. The fedoras have gone the way of the all-male newsroom but not the credentials, and today those ‘tickets’ are usually laminated cards worn around the neck. Whatever their form, credentials can be seen as a mark of professionalism, as a link between journalists and their sources, and, from the perspective of police departments, a means of managing public relations. For while acute moments of physical violence often capture media attention, maintaining the social order is largely a discursive project (Manning, 1977; Perlmutter, 2000; Wilson, 2000). Stuart Hall et al. (1978) at the Center for Critical Cultural Studies called the relationship between police and media a mutual spiral that served to ‘reproduce the definitions of the powerful’ (pp. 59–60). This ‘spiral’ produces discourse through the everyday, embodied practices that coordinate power, and as such, the large-scale perspective of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers a helpful foundation for this enterprise (Benson, 2003; Bourdieu, 1980, 1984; Swartz, 1997; Waisbord, 2013).
Credentials and distinction
Credentials might be considered a special case within the sociology of the professions, documents that represent advanced training, or education in the form of diplomas, licenses, and certification (Baker, 2011; Brown and Bills, 2011). Traditionally, they reference the training that a person has received in his or her field of work and are markers of prestige (Adams, 2013). Much of the recent literature on the subject originates from the field of education, which has examined the way credentials define groups (MacDonald, 1995), are produced by increasingly fragmented institutions (Smetherham, 2013), and perpetuate economic stratification (Collins, 1979).
Credentialing takes a different form for American journalists, whose rights under the First Amendment actually preclude the sort of licensure imposed on other professions. American journalists often have degrees from accredited universities, but these degrees are not required and, indeed, were historically dismissed as superfluous by some news managers who considered the ‘world’ to be a reporter’s true classroom (Beaujon, 2012). Indeed, the word ‘professional’ for journalism is a multi-faceted term that can simply describe one who is paid or a set of normative standards for ethics and practices (Banning, 1998; Waisbord, 2013). As Carlson (2006) put it, ‘without clear and stable boundaries between journalist/non-journalist, journalism does not correspond easily with professionalism’ (p. 121). As a result, journalism in the United States has instead tended its borders through extra-legal, discursive means. Zelizer (1993) has suggested that American journalists might well be considered an ‘interpretive community’ as defined by Hymes (1980) whose term describes a group united by its shared interpretations of reality.
Studies of boundary work have usefully drawn from Bourdieu’s sociology (Benson, 2003; Bourdieu, 1980, 1984). In contrast with the structuralism, which tended to naturalize status, Bourdieu saw fields (and the status of those within them) as sites of continuous struggle, negotiation, and maintenance. Bourdieu (1980) studied the power of symbolic capital without neglecting the realities of embodied experience in a particular social environment or ‘habitus’. His counterpoint to structuralism is particularly useful for the study of police and press in the United States because it operates through such a complex assemblage of discursive practices within the ‘structuring structures’ of habitus (1980). He studied power without neglecting its roots in the ways human experience in situations that have temporal, geographic, and institutional constraints. Credentials are a sort of ‘symbolic capital’, that simultaneously enable and regulate human activity. In his words, Symbolic power works partly through the control of other people’s bodies and belief that is given by the collectively recognized capacity to act in various ways on deep-rooted linguistic and muscular patterns of behavior, either by neutralizing them or reactivating them to function mimetically. (Bourdieu, 1980: 69)
For American journalists, the press pass – whether issued by the White House, a concert venue, or a police department – does not constitute a formal educational credential as much as a symbol of group membership, one that constructs and maintains solidarity while also enabling agencies to manage those journalists.
Credentials and police public relations
The two fields of policing and journalism developed simultaneously during the turn of the last Century. Police forces took on scientific standards and practices at the same time that journalism industrialized, and importantly, both institutions embraced the camera as a source of discursive authority. Yet for both fields, the image is secondary to the larger story, and social order is shaped largely by narrative. Journalism uses images in ways that exploit their power for the sake of narrative authenticity – and so do police (Sekula, 1986; Zelizer, 2005) Christopher P. Wilson (2000), who studied the ways that both journalism and fiction has shaped the way police establish social control noted that ‘… the police have always been knowledge workers of a kind’ arguing that not only do agencies produce the statistics and define what crime is, but they help to craft the public sphere’s morality tales (p. 5).
By issuing a police department press pass, departments have traditionally forged formal relationships with the journalistic field. The most basic perquisite of a credential grants journalists geophysical access to newsworthy scenes, but they also act as symbols that separate journalists from the average citizen, and ‘insider’ literally and metaphorically. For journalists, insider status is both essential and problematic. It is essential because reporters need access to information and events but problematic in that it can compromise a reporter’s independence (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001; Berkowitz and TerKeurst, 1999; Waisbord, 2013). News ethnographers have noted that beat reporters, because they are highly dependent upon and so often mingle with the authorities they cover, are susceptible to a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome, adopting an ideological perspective that favors their patrons (Bock and Araiza, 2014; Cook, 2005; Hall et al., 1978; Tuchman, 1978). Finally, while power is usually negotiated in these relationships, the source usually holds the trump card in the form of information or geophysical access (Berkowitz and TerKeurst, 1999; Reich, 2006; Sigal, 1973; Strentz, 1977). Opening and closing the literal and metaphorical gates to information is one way sources set, or at least influence, the larger news agenda (Reese, 1991).
Undoubtedly, police public information officers (PIOs) would disagree that they hold the power in this relationship, given the First Amendment freedoms that allow journalists to criticize the government. Police officers often feel misunderstood by the public, journalists, and academics (Perlmutter, 2000). At the same time, policing organizations have long recognized that they must have public support if they are to function and are, in the words of Chermak and Weiss (2005: 502), ‘unfortunately consumed by this battle’ (see also Stateman, 1997; Surette, 2001; Surette and Richard, 1995).
For police agencies, it pays to cultivate relationships with the journalists who cover them. Credentials represent a way to codify that relationship and offer several advantages. For one, they can better keep track of the working journalists who cover them and maintain lists for press releases and communiques. Second, a reporter’s ‘insider’ status cultivates the sort of informal connections that cultivate sympathy for officers and the work that they do, exerting informal control over coverage. A third advantage is that credentials make it possible for police to literally control the bodies of journalists and access to geophysical space.
Credentials and geophysical access
To bear witness is a sacred social act, particularly when a person views tragedy, injustice, or atrocity and gives testimony (Peters, 2001). Faith in witnessing, coupled with the perfection of a camera’s recorded image, has historically formed the base for documentary photography (Azoulay, 2008; Ritchin, 2009). Eyewitnessing, what Zelizer (2007) dubbed a ‘key word’ used by journalists to establish authority, is slippery if not illusory (Ahva and Pantti, 2014). TV reporters might narrate footage obtained remotely or rely on pool feeds for video of events they themselves cannot attend (Zelizer, 1990). Yet, unlike correspondents, producers, or scriptwriters, visual journalists cannot cover events indirectly (Bock, 2009).
Visual journalists must directly document events in order to draw upon the authority of what Peters (2001) conceptualized as the purest form of witnessing. Visual coverage that is close, emotional, and ‘behind the scenes’ normally viewed by the public is prized. Taking chances to get close is one way war photojournalists can make a name for themselves (Moeller, 1989). Street photographer ‘Weegee’ Arthur Fellig actually did earn his nickname by being first to the crime scene so often that his colleagues thought he must be using a Ouija board (Cookman, 2009).
Crime news is a staple of journalism, especially TV and visual journalism, in part for its emotional draw (which at its worst is sensationalism) and the ease with which it can be covered compared with more complex or abstract ‘issue’ stories (Chiricos et al., 2000; Kaniss, 1991; Lipschultz and Hilt, 2002). Access to such coverage is the ‘capital’ under negotiation between police and the press; access is the reason that a credential has historically been so important for journalists. Yet as critics have pointed out, access is a heady drug – one reason political elites learned to use it to curry favor with the visual press (Barnouw, 1974; Pfau et al., 2005). Heavy film and video cameras contributed to the rise of what Boorstin (1961) dubbed the ‘pseudo event’, an activity whose primary purpose is to attract media attention, which at their worst might be considered a form of collusion in which journalists put more effort into producing a ‘show’ than covering the news (Adatto, 2008; Edelman, 1988).
Although any person can ‘commit journalism’ without a license, press credentials are often required for access to spaces in which news is made (Mäenpää, 2014). As it has in so many other news environments, digitization has disrupted credential policies in a variety of venues, such as the US Congress’ press gallery system, which has traditionally managed media by type according to an agreement between lawmakers and press associations (Bock, 2009; Heaney, 2008). For sports coverage, digitization has opened up new revenue streams for team managers while restricting traditional news access and thereby retaining better control over a team’s image (Calzada, 2010; Gabel and Feiser, 2001; Suggs, 2015). Holton (2012) found that bloggers were most likely to have the hardest time gaining access to baseball credentials.
The digital media environment, along with its mobile technologies, also changes the role of the body in witnessing and documentary photography. Citizen journalists, who may be physically present during a breaking news situation before a professional can arrive, are capturing compelling videos of disasters, crime, and police use of force situations (Allan, 2013; Bock, 2016). Remote video cameras operated by the government and private enterprises have created a surveillance environment that not only assists police investigations but also feeds television newscasts (Gynnild, 2014; Lyon, 2007).
Internet scholars have advanced theories about the body and the digital world, revealing the problematic nature of the body–technology binary and the complexity of human experience online (Farman, 2013; McCullough, 2006; Walther, 1996). Mobile media in particular confound historic ideas about bodies and space, for our hands can be operating an app that communicates far away, while our feet are on the ground in another place and we speak with someone in a ‘space’ that only exists in our minds (Rheingold, 2002). The digital media environment does not erase the body, but stratifies the way it is conceptualized, bringing into sharp relief those instances when the body is and when it is distanced.
Summary
For journalists, particularly photojournalists, a police press pass can provide the geophysical access to events that can make all the difference in news coverage. In exchange, police agencies are better able to know who is who in the press corps for the sake of shaping public opinion. Bourdieu’s field theory provides a helpful foundation for investigating this relationship. His emphasis on power relationships interrogates whether credentials operate structurally, as markers of professional membership or as symbolic capitol in the exchange between two fields with competing interests. The new digital media environment, replete with new participants, instant world-wide audiences, and multi-media engagement, is changing the way human actors operate in those fields and is no doubt making a difference in their relationship.
Methodology and method
This project resulted from questions that emerged during an effort to create a simple credentialing directory for US photojournalists seeking information about the policies of different departments across the country. There is no central system for press credentialing in the United States; the regulatory environment is idiosyncratic, localized, and constantly changing. The National Press Photography Association, for instance, has several links on its website at nppa.org for credential policies, but advises that it is usually necessary to contact individual departments individually. We set out to create a list that would provide police department credentialing information for the largest 100 cities as designated by population according to the US Census (Census.gov). In the course of collecting the information, it became clear that the final list was going to be relatively short, as a number of large metropolitan areas have stopped issuing credentials in the past several years and a majority of small communities never did. The changes in the large cities captured our theoretical curiosity and gave rise to our guiding question which is rooted in Bourdieu’s field theory:
RQ. What do changes in press credential policies indicate about the relationship between US journalists and police departments in the digital age?
Qualitative approaches are well suited to such preliminary and exploratory questions, and so, we followed up with the police information officers who were willing to speak with us, using loosely structured qualitative interviews to explore the nature of the changes (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Tracy, 2013). We collected details about the policies by phone and e-mail, charted them and tracked themes in the PIO interviews using the constant comparison method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). In all, the material analyzed for this project comprised two parts: the census of police departments (Table 1) and follow-up interviews with police information officers. The research protocol was approved by the authors’ supervising institutional review board.
Police department press credential policies.*
Cities are ranked according to the United States Census Bureau (2010).
No* indicates recently stopped; blank spaces indicate no answer (yet) from police departments.
Findings
Interestingly, just the process of pursuing this information was itself indicative of the way police departments interact with the public. Our first effort with a signed, institutional review board (IRB)-approved consent form yielded only two interviews. The next effort, with a revised IRB, used an online survey tool and gained another 12 responses. Not until we revised our IRB application again, allowing us to conduct an e-mail survey and brief, unrecorded phone interviews, were we able to collect the bulk of the information. Simply ascertaining the names of the PIOs often took multiple phone calls; rarely were our questions answered during first contact.
Table 1 depicts the credentials policies for the 100 largest cities (based on population) in the United States. The final tally: 10 cities still issue press credentials, 45 do not, 8 once did but no longer do (this number may be higher and is based on the memories of the PIOs), and 23 cities had not responded at the time the study was completed. The pattern that emerged is not dramatic, yet its details suggest shifts that are nevertheless significant for what they reflect about the digital media environment and Bourdieu’s ideas about symbolic power.
Cities that do not
Mid-size and smaller American city police departments in the study do not issue press credentials, and most of these have not ever done so according to the memories of the officers contacted. One reason given is reflected in community size, and so PIOs could keep track of their journalistic contacts easily. A second reason cited was that it is too difficult to determine who is a journalist in the digital age. The PIO of a southern mid-size city put it this way: ‘In today’s environment I’m not sure what a press pass would accomplish’. When asked ‘how do you know who your reporters are?’ a college-town PIO answered, ‘You don’t. Everybody is a journalist now. Believe it or not, the TV and newspapers are watching FB and Twitter’.
One officer from a small Southwestern town who has been on the job for 12 years said, ‘all the local people – we know’ and that he maintains a good relationship with local journalists, concluding that ‘we still get good coverage’. He, like many other PIOs who helped with this project, did see a difference between paid journalists working for legacy media (‘These guys are just true journalists’) and citizen journalists who shoot and post video to the web, a practice he says is ‘all about the video and not the facts’. Another small-city PIO explained that when he is on a scene and looking for the local legacy media, he looks for the ‘big cameras’, and he hasn’t had, as he puts it, any ‘problems’ with citizen journalists or bloggers who might be less cooperative (from his perspective) or critical of police.
A representative from a mid-size city in the central United States says he contacts local media by text and meets them at scenes. This department also issues a special pager to local, legacy news organizations, which sends a notice when PIOs are headed to a crime scene. ‘We know most media in the city’, he says, and as for bloggers and citizen journalists, ‘they don’t make it to too many scenes’. PIOs for many cities also report that although they do not issue a police department credential, they might sanction and distribute entry-pass-style credentials for major events, such as large festivals, concerts, or major sporting events. A California PIO said his city decided it was impossible to determine ‘what exactly is a media person’, but that he does issue parking pass privileges for local news organization vehicles because his city has considerable traffic congestion.
Cities that stopped
Some departments (marked in Table 1. with an asterisk) stopped issuing credentials since in past decade. While the PIOs cited several reasons, the most frequent echoed the admonition of the departments that have eschewed credentials all along, namely, the difficulty of making a determination as to who is a ‘legitimate’ or ‘professional’ journalist.
‘It became too difficult to identify legitimate press’, explained the police representative of a central state city. The PIO for a large southern city, who wrote a recommendation to his chief against starting a credential program, argued that We are of the opinion that the issuance of credentials would place us in the position of determining who is and who is not legitimate (sic) media. The City of […] Police Department is not willing to make that determination.
Another large city police department shifted responsibility for press badges to the Mayor’s office in 2012, but the press aide who inherited the task quickly realized she had no time to investigate and determine who should get such a pass. Instead, she is made sure to issue parking passes to a few representatives of the mainstream, commercial media in her city, and the city press pass program is history.
Interestingly, echoing the remarks from smaller departments, even big city PIOs say they’ve experienced little impact after eliminating press credentials because they’re already acquainted with the journalists they need to know. The PIO of a Southwestern city said, ‘We already know who these people are … We work with some journalists on a first-name basis’, and ‘we get to know them’. The importance of knowing the local reporters was often spoken of as mark of professionalism on the part of the PIOs, in keeping with the tenets of good public relations practices. ‘I know most of them by sight. When an intern or new one comes to the market they usually introduce themselves’, explains a PIO from small Southwestern city in an e-mail.
More than one department reported ending the practice because of credential abuse: ‘they were being used to access unauthorized areas’ (such as going backstage at concerts and onto the field at sporting events). The prospect of such abuse was cited by another department as a reason to *not* start a credentialing program. As with the cities that do not issue a police press pass but still issue one-time credentials for special events, several department PIOs said that they reserved the right to start up a credentialing process for major events or breaking stories as a way to decide who should or should not be allowed into police department facilities or news conferences.
Cities that still issue credentials
Cities that continue the practice tended to be among the largest in the United States, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and it is far more difficult to ‘know’ everyone covering the department. Applications for credentials generally require the submission not only of employer information but also publications. These cities also have larger public relations staffs, making it impossible for one person to effectively network with journalists.
In these cities, the credential generally provides geophysical access to spaces under police control. In Chicago, for instance, a credential is necessary for access to restricted press boxes in city meetings. Chicago and Los Angeles press badges also offer visual journalists closer access to stabilized crime scenes, with a sort of buffer zone in which journalists, but not the public, could enter. One small Midwestern city issues cards with micro-chips that work as keys for local reporters who wish to enter a room in police headquarters to review incident reports.
Yet, the use of the press credential for access to geophysical space is not always a benefit for journalists. One of the best examples of the downside comes from the final night of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York, when police decided to break up the camp (Ensslin and Henkel, 2011; Stelter and Baker, 2011). During the operation, police blocked reporters, even credentialed reporters, from observing or interviewing protesters at other protest sites in downtown Manhattan. Some called the incident a ‘media blackout’ and believed that the police efforts were a deliberate attempt to control coverage. Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the action, saying police were trying to protect the journalists.
Discussion
Three theoretically significant observations emerge from this project’s findings. First, as expected, the rise of citizen journalism in the digital environment has disrupted relationships between police and traditional, paid journalists. Second, police are adapting and using new media to further their public relations goals. Third, police departments are shifting credentialing responsibilities to private entities, part of a larger neoliberal shift in the United States. Together, these findings advance Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital and the way it maintains relationships to the benefit of the powerful (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Our findings constitute a contemporary illustration of the Birmingham school’s contention that the press–police relationship ultimately serves the interests of the established order (Hall et al., 1978).
New media challenges
The rise of citizen journalism and the blurring of professional boundaries have opened the doors to many more voices, some purposive, some occasional or accidental. Police departments that have opted to end their credentialing programs because they can’t find the professional boundary have essentially adopted the playground aphorism that ‘if everybody’s special, nobody is special’. In a country that grants all citizens freedom of speech, why not grant credentials to any and all applicants? Opting to end credential programs lays bare the primary purpose of maintaining relationships with individual journalists, which is not to maintain a relationship but to control the narrative. Recall the PIO of a small department who noted that even without credentials they still get good press and the PIO who said it’s not clear what could be accomplished with a credentialing program – implying that there was no benefit to the department. Alternative means for helping conventional press organizations with parking passes or regular text messages advance police–public relations goals with less time and effort.
Not a single one of the PIOs contacted for this project said that citizen journalists or bloggers posed problems for their operations at a level that required policy changes, although they did point to the way citizen journalism blurred the border of professional journalism. A few PIOs, however, whether or not their departments issued credentials, were adamant that they could define journalistic professionalism. One small-city 12-year veteran recalled a major news event that attracted coverage from national organizations and remarked that ‘I found that these guys are just true journalists’. A PIO from another Southwestern city said he absolutely saw a difference in that professional journalists: ‘They will not put out information until it’s vetted’, that is, ‘they’ve called to verify’, whereas citizen journalists will ‘just run with whatever’. Citizen videos of police activity posted without context were occasionally criticized as unprofessional. Finally, one PIO noted that citizen journalists work in his community, but usually write commentary and don’t need to be managed in a geophysical sense because they ‘don’t make it to too many scenes’.
Social media and the reporter–source relationship
PIOs are still finding ways to stay in touch with reporters using social media and other digital tools. In some ways, these informal channels represent long-standing public relations: knowing your audience, learning reporters’ names, and maintaining relationships with those who cover your beat. At the same time, these digital tools flatten the playing field, making all journalists equal and making it possible to completely bypass news organizations.
When a news release is issued, everyone gets it at the same time in one Southwestern city, where it doesn’t matter whether the target is a blogger, a long-time TV reporter, or a newspaper writer, ‘everyone is treated the same’. A PIO from a mid-size city said that because so much more communication could take place via e-mail and social media that her department was holding far fewer news conferences than in years past. Such tactics erode the sort of ‘insider’ relationships that beat reporters attempt to cultivate with police sources, giving PIOs more control and distance.
Police investigators adopted social media for solving crimes rather quickly (Bendler et al., 2014; Crump, 2011; Lee, 2015), so it’s not surprising that social media might also operate as a public relations tool. The PIO of one small Midwestern city noted that police can now get tips complete with video evidence from interested citizens, and because of cellphones, they can get witnessed reports on crimes as they happen. It’s also hardly surprising that every department in the census has a web presence, often with links to stories about promotions and departmental ceremonies. Yet, it is rare to find clear, easily located information on the website about how to contact a PIO. In many departments, simply ascertaining contact information for a PIO required at least one phone call, a process that allows callers requesting information to be better vetted and managed, contradicting the ostensible claims of public openness and transparency.
Rheingold’s (2002) stratified conceptualization of the body in the digital realm, that is, its essentiality for some kinds of communication and occlusion for others is also illustrated by our findings. Photojournalism requires bodies to be engaged to create messages, but physical presence is not necessary for message dissemination on social media. Geophysical control of photographer’s bodies is more difficult because of the ubiquity of smart phone video, which renders credentials less important. At the same time, social media renders the physicality of other journalistic practice unnecessary: no need for personal visits at headquarters, availabilities, or news conferences; departments can craft and disseminate their own narratives directly to the public. Except in cases of certain types of video evidence, images have been generally been subservient to narrative for police, journalists, and the public, so here is little need to let visual journalists have any special access.
Privatizing credentials
Whether or not a department issues credentials, the task of identifying the people who cover news on a regular basis remains important for public relations. But instead of making their own designation of professionalism, many municipal police departments have shifted that responsibility to the institutions employing journalists, which in the United States are primarily commercial, private sector organizations. Instead of a publicly supported institution defining who journalists are, journalists are circularly defined by being employed by a news organization. One PIO wrote, ‘We work very closely with our local media and personally know most of them, however we do check their identification badges issued by their station’. Identifying members of the paid press is critical not because of news distribution, as it is dramatically clear that a single bystander with one video can make international news. That this distinction of the working press remains so important even in cities without credentialing is testament to the goals of PIOs to cultivate what they consider a ‘positive’ source–reporter relationship, one in which the reporters understand and presumably communicate the police perspective.
As police departments are getting out of the ‘credential business’, institutions that control space – government buildings, sports stadiums, and entertainment venues – are maintaining and in some cases tightening their credentialing practices (Calzada, 2010; National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), 2013). Freelance journalists face credential refusals more often than organizational employees, although they may do the same type of work, share the same ethical guidelines, and often have their work show up in the same publications and programs (Hermes et al., 2014; Sherer, 1988). Private entertainment owners are able to control their message by bypassing journalists completely.
The credential squeeze is most painfully experienced by visual journalists, whose First Amendment newsgathering rights are not necessarily protected by federal and state courts the same way writers are (Freedman, 1984; Middleton, 1982). It is one thing to have access to sources for facts, another entirely to have geophysical access that enables visual coverage (Bock, 2011; Sherer, 1991). Even when visual journalists are granted entry to key events, they are regulated in ways that writing journalists are not, partly because tripods and conventional television cameras are large and unwieldy, but with consequences that generally provide favorable ‘optics’ for the host in control (Adatto, 2008; Bock, 2009; Edelman, 1988). During a 2015 campaign event with Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, credentialed press were literally roped into a cluster as they covered a parade (Ronayne, 2015).
Conclusion
The changing form of the credential is less important to this discussion than the implications of the policy changes, which, as our findings suggest, is a tactical shift by police departments to maintain control over their narratives in the most efficient manner possible. The new media environment has blurred the boundaries of journalism and departments that decide to avoid the question altogether are still able to work with conventional journalists and advance their narratives. Our findings suggest that, as Bourdieu might have predicted, the police press pass is (and has likely always been) more important as a public relations tool, a means of control, than a civic designation of professional status.
This project is limited by its focus on the American case. Journalists in other countries are often credentialed by professional or union organizations that assess an applicant’s education and background. It is also limited by its focus on police agencies as issuers of credentials especially in light of evidence that credentialing is moving toward a more neoliberal system rooted in corporate control of space. Nevertheless, the study sheds light on the way the digital environment is changing the way various fields, defend, define, and maintain their borders in order to maintain cultural power.
Declarations by PIOs that everyone is ‘the same’ in the new media environment conflicts with their overall desire to work with professional ‘legitimate’ journalists. A related tension is rooted in uniquely First Amendment quandary that sets the ‘press’ aside for protection while complicating possibilities for defining who the press is. The latter task has been left to journalists themselves. That authorities shape the news agenda through the source–journalist relationship is well established. This study advances such scholarship in that it identifies the way credential policy changes are a reflection of the impact of smart phones, social media, and the mobile Internet on the source–journalist relationship. These policy changes underscore the contemporary blurring of boundaries around professional journalism while illustrating the way technology is changing how police departments attempt to control their image in news. Such policy changes are small, often insider, minutia of local concern, but they are nevertheless indicators of long-term changes in the way journalists cover police work in their communities.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We received internal funding from the University but no grant from any external source.