ArcaMax

Journalists in Ferguson, Missouri don't face as many risks as our colleagues in Syria, but that's not much to brag about.

Hardly anything compares to the dangers journalists face in Syria, where James Foley, a freelance photojournalist for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, was beheaded by a jihadist from the Islamic State.

The Internet posting of the ghastly murder suggests that the global jihadi wars have crossed into a new stage, which journalists are not just at-risk but targets to be kidnapped and held for ransom or gruesomely killed for purposes of propaganda.

Syria has led the world for the past two years as a dangerous place to practice journalism, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member. At least 70, most of them Syrians, have been killed covering the conflict and more than 80 have been abducted, CPJ's highest tally in its 33-year history. About 20, most of them Syrians, are currently missing in the country.

Journalists don't face risks like that for practicing journalism in this country, which is one of many excellent reasons to live here.

But in Ferguson, where protests and some eruptions of violence followed the Aug. 9 police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, journalists sometimes were arrested, detained, manhandled or harassed by police, according to various accounts.

Since Brown's death, local or state police have arrested or detained at least 11 reporters or photographers, according to a running tab on the Poynter Institute's website. Even Amnesty International sent human rights observers to the city to support free speech and press -- the first time it's done so in this country.

Among the first and most widely reported incidents was when Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly were arrested and briefly put in a holding cell after police ordered them to leave a McDonalds. Lowery was "illegally instructed to stop taking video of officers" in the McDonalds, as Washington Post executive editor Martin D. Baron later wrote, and then "slammed against a soda machine and handcuffed."

In fact, while it is illegal in some states to record other people without their consent, federal courts have upheld a First Amendment right to record police as they perform their official duties in public, unless the person with the camera is interfering with police work.

At least some of the police in Ferguson apparently interpreted "interference" a too broadly in the fog of tear gas and other mayhem.

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