At the Hillside Club in Berkeley Monday night, a packed house assembled to hear journalist Joe Dworetzky and First Amendment lawyer David Snyder dig into an issue affecting not just towns such as Berkeley and Piedmont, but the entire country: how do we resist the ongoing wave of attacks on freedom of the press?
Dworetzky, a former lawyer who writes regularly for the Bay City News, and Snyder, a former journalist turned Executive Director of the First Amendment Coalition, were joined by Kat Rowlands, the publisher and executive director of Local News Matters and the Bay City News Foundation.
For Dworetzky, who traveled to frigid Minneapolis in January to report on the street protests against ICE, the intimidation tactics deployed by ICE, the closing of hundreds of local newspapers around the country and the layoff of thousands of journalists are all connected. Together, Dworetzky explained, these changes are feeding a crisis in
America.
“Journalism is a way of telling stories that bring us one step closer to each other, helping us understand each other better. What the government is doing now, by arresting journalists, pressuring news organizations, labeling journalists as enemies of the people, attacking press freedoms, all that puts us in a very dangerous place. They
are pulling us farther apart,” he said.
The First Amendment Coalition’s Snyder agreed that “journalists have always been criticized by government but now the challenges are coming faster, harder and more directly than ever.” He cited the recent FBI raid on a Washington Post Reporter’s home, in which the federal government claimed to be seeking the name of the reporter’s sources, as well as the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort who were covering an anti-ICE protest in a Minneapolis church. Fort was taken into custody at her home by a dozen DHS agents in a dawn raid. Fort was federally charged, along with Lemon, of violating the rights of parishioners.
But it’s difficult to find an attorney not on the DHS payroll who believes the charges will stick. “The point of this is not for the government to get a conviction,” Snyder said. “It’s intimidation. It’s to make journalists worry that if they cover government officials or activities too closely, they may be the next one arrested.”
The Trump administration’s policy of targeting or applying pressure on press freedoms has also trickled down to local levels, sometimes popping up in surprising places. Here in the Bay Area last year, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s staff turned away Berkeley Scanner editor Emile Raguso from a media event. The D.A.’s office later reversed that after the First Amendment Coalition advised it that banning the journalist “violated the First Amendment and threatened freedom of the press.” In 2025 the Shasta County Registrar of Voter also drew the attention of the First Amendment Coalition when its new Registrar stopped sending press releases to the local online newspaper the Shasta Scout because he didn’t like their coverage of his office.
Journalist Dworetzky said that one of the lessons he took away from his ICE reporting in Minneapolis is that core press freedoms are being tested, freedoms that will likely soon be tested in other cities as well. Every community must understand that journalists and journalism depend on conditions we may easily take for granted: an environment where sources are not intimidated to speak to you; where you are not afraid for your personal safety; where you have access to courts and government buildings, where you and your publisher can write things critical of government without consequence.
In contentious political environments, in small towns such as Piedmont or cities like Berkeley, vital government information and services such as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data can be slow-walked by government officials or in some cases even tied up by nuisance requests.
Snyder and Dworetzky wound up by advising communities that repairing the damage we see now inflicted by the Trump administration can happen but only if we continue building relationships with each other at a local level. What gave Minneapolis the ability to resist is its strong community ties, and an important piece of that is strong local journalism. Said Snyder, “it will help pull us out of the destruction.”