Drop charges against Cincinnati journalists before upcoming trial

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Jury trials of journalists arrested while reporting news are exceedingly rare in the United States. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) that maintains data on press freedom violations nationwide, has documented only nine in its history. The next two are scheduled to take place in Kenton County, Kentucky, in just a couple weeks. Journalists Madeline Fening and Lucas Griffith, both of whom were arrested while covering a protest on July 17 for Cincinnati-based CityBeat (Griffith is a student journalist at the University of Cincinnati who interned at CityBeat), are set to be tried Sept. 30 and Oct. 2, respectively. In an unfortunate irony, the protest was in opposition to the immigration detention of Ayman Soliman, who himself fled Egypt to escape persecution for his journalism. A coalition of press freedom organizations and Cincinnati journalism professors sent a letter to the prosecutor, County Attorney Stacy Tapke,