Hidden in Plain Sight: Media Workers for Social Change, Chapter 5

I met Josh Wolf at a North Berkeley café near the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he is now enrolled. Having ascertained beforehand that I was not going to broadcast the recording, he had ordered lunch, which he ate as we began to talk. The first thing I asked was what happened in San Francisco on the night of July 8, 2005, when he shot the video that would change his career and his life.

Wolf said that at first he felt there was nothing so unusual about the demonstration that evening. It was called by Anarchist Action—which he described as “sort of a confederation of anarchists”—in solidarity with those protesting against a meeting of the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. He had covered dozens of similar protests, and sat in on an organizing meeting for this one.

There was the usual gathering, at 16th and Mission, a brief prelude to a wandering march accompanied by a sound system. Some minor damage was done to windows and newspaper racks. After a while, the SFPD showed up in riot gear. Wolf remembered they were “sort of far removed, not very confrontationally close … the police seemed sort of sedate about issuing orders like: ‘This is an unpermitted march. If you fail to disperse, you could be arrested.’ It just didn’t have much intensity … it almost felt like they were going through the motions.”

Except that is, for one officer and his partner. Wolf, who studied the police reports after the fact, said their patrol car arrived at the march after a call from a neighbor complaining about a disturbance, and the officers were not aware that there was a demonstration going on. They “thought they were dealing with some random disturbance behavior,” he said. They saw the back end of the march, and approached it with a more aggressive attitude than the other units. “It wasn’t long before they decided the best way to disperse the crowd was just to drive into it,” Wolf said. A couple of the protesters were carrying a big sign made of styrofoam, and they dropped it and it went under the car.

“I don’t know if the police car was actually disabled by the sign, but they got out of the car and chased after the guys that had been holding the sign,” Wolf said. One of them, Gabe Myers, was “tackled to the ground, and put in a chokehold, with his head on one side of the curb and his body on the other, the curb digging into his throat, and he was there on the ground for quite some time. As a very small crowd stood back, seeing what was happening, the other officer ran into the crowd looking for the other person that had been holding the sign. I have no idea whether he found him. I didn’t see that side.”

Wolf was busy filming Myers. His raw video, still available on Indybay, shows Myers being hurt in darkness, really only as audio, except when flashes from the camera of a nearby still photographer lit the scene. Some of the anarchists accused and taunted the cop. There was a lot of yelling back and forth. The other officer, Peter Shields, who had begun to use his baton to put down the crowd, received a blow in return, which fractured his skull. Wolf could hear the cry “Officer down! Officer down!” and right away there was a swarm of cops.

“It just sort of dispersed naturally after that point,” Wolf concluded. Apparently everyone had had enough for the night.

Wolf went home and edited down his half-hour of footage into the rough four-minute video he posted to Indybay, and posted to his own website as well. He had recently been in contact with the online news manager and the videography trainer at KRON-TV. When he saw on the station’s site that it was seeking video of the demonstration, he made a tactical decision to make his video available to them. “Obviously,” he said, “I was loath to license my material for them to cut up and tell the story they want to tell. The only reason I sold it to KRON, admittedly, was that I was trying to figure out some means of getting a job doing news video.”

What Wolf didn’t expect was that besides running on KRON-TV, the video was grabbed by KTVU, KPIX, NBC and CBS, where portions of it were run without payment or attribution.

After consulting with his contact at KRON, Wolf decided to bill all the stations that used the video $500, four times the normal rate for freelancers. They all paid that amount except for CBS, which paid $250. “There’s certainly something satisfying about getting the news media to pay four times their rate because they fucked up and didn’t ask permission,” he said. “And it’s important that the news media know that they need to license their content—just because it’s on the Internet, you can’t just steal it.”

Two days after the event, there was a knock on Wolf’s door. He was on the phone in his living room, talking to his mother. He opened the door and met a man in Bermuda shorts and a white summery shirt, despite the cold, and with him a woman in a white spaghetti strap tank top and skinny blue jeans. His first thought was that they were a couple of reporters from The LA Times, or perhaps even The Miami Herald. “Hey, are you Josh?” the man asked. “Yeah, yeah, I’m Josh Wolf,” he replied, “What’s up?” The pair flashed FBI badges, and two SFPD detectives came from the sides of the entrance to his building, where they had been hidden from sight, and suddenly Wolf was confronted with four investigators. He reached back and shut the door, according to his training as a radical journalist, but in doing so he inadvertently locked himself out.

Stranded in front of his apartment, Wolf decided to talk to the investigators, but only about how the police had broken their own procedural rules at the demonstration. The investigators then asked for all of his tape. “No, I don’t really think so,” Wolf said. He countered with an offer to sell them the same tape he had sold the television stations. They weren’t satisfied with that. A neighbor had returned home and Wolf was able to enter his apartment, but the FBI agents grabbed the front gate as it was closing, and came to his front door, continuing to press him for his tape. Wolf demurred. After some more conversation the FBI and the SFPD finally left, and Wolf, again sticking to his training, made a call right away to the National Lawyer’s Guild for advice and representation. Through his NLG attorney, he informed the authorities that he would not provide them with any of his video except for what was broadcasted.

At about this point in telling his story, Wolf’s attention turned to three co-eds studying at tables behind us, one of whom was leaving. Josh thought it was because we were loud and asked if we should move. “No,” one of them giggled, “it’s alright—interesting story.” Wolf had gained some new fans. After a moment we returned to the interview.

“An attack on a police officer was really what catalyzed this investigation,” Wolf said. The SFPD was extremely frustrated not to have a suspect for the attack. The investigation was something of a vendetta. Gabe Meyers was charged with “lynching” himself, which technically means trying to take himself out of police custody. That was presumably because he wriggled to try to get out of being choked, while a crowd gave him verbal support. (After he went through a lengthy and costly process of readying himself for trial, the charges were dropped).

The SFPD did a couple of things to make sure the case was handled by feds. Officer Shields is gay, and the head of the LGBT wing of the Police Officer’s Association called the FBI to say they needed assistance because the attack could have been a hate crime. That was a bit ludicrous, assuming a demonstrator would know Shields was gay—and would care. Then the SFPD went looking through the Patriot Act and found that any destruction of the property of a local agency that receives federal money, as was the case for the San Francisco Police Department, becomes a federal issue. The SFPD asserted Shields’ car had a tail light broken. For that reason, the case went before a federal grand jury.

Wolf was subpoenaed at the end of 2005 and brought before the grand jury in July of 2006. He knew he was headed for trouble. “In reality journalists have no protection whatsoever in the context of a federal grand jury,” he told me. Yet he had a point to prove: “We are not an investigative source for the government.”

After Wolf asserted his constitutional rights on the witness stand, the judge told him that if he didn’t answer the Ninth U.S. Attorney’s questions there could be consequences, even jail. A couple of hearings later, he was taken into custody. Wolf spent a month in jail before his appeal against the contempt citation resulted in him being released on his own recognizance. But two weeks later, a different panel of Ninth-circuit judges rejected his appeal. Wolf said, “The U.S. Attorney kept asserting that I was only a journalist in my own mind and that if they put me in jail long enough I’d eventually snap out of it and realize that I was actually an activist with a camera.”

Instead, Wolf stood firm in his refusal. He spent another six and a half months behind bars, the longest time any American journalist had spent incarcerated for contempt, for which he received several prestigious national journalism awards. The Society for Professional Journalists came up with $30,000 to help cover the costs of his defense. A support committee sprang up. He had become a celebrity.

He spent his prison time in the general population of Dublin Federal Detention Center. “There’s a certain role that everyone has in jail,” he said, “and the lowest is a snitch. So to be in jail for not snitching alone is a fairly strong place to be coming from, in the whole social hierarchy.” Some questioned what he was doing there, since he is not a criminal. But he explained that he was “able to make friends with different races, in ways that no other person could, and got to understand a lot of different stories of how our justice system works from a different perspective than you ever would on the street.”

Mostly, he said, “it was really boring. I read probably 90 books while I was there.” He worked out daily with some of the guys, putting on thirty pounds of muscle, to the point where his clothes wouldn’t fit. He didn’t spend any time in the hole, although for a while he considered volunteering to go in for a day for the experience. But he decided against it.

On Valentine’s Day, 1997, a federal judge brought Wolf’s case into mediation. Wolf heard a rumor that the Judge’s wife was sympathetic to his case, and was actually withholding sex from her husband over it, but he acknowledges that the rumor is “pure hearsay.” At any rate, Wolf eventually agreed to post all of his video on his website in return for his release. There was nothing incriminating in the video. Wolf was free, and his point was made.

In the summer of 2008, Wolf got a job as a general assignment reporter for The Daily Post, a mainstream newspaper for the Palo Alto area. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted the following from Wolf’s blog: "If the haters who said I wasn't a real journalist, are still lurking, I hope you don't have too much indigestion after eating your words.” He was at The Post for a year, and he liked it there. He said he learned from his editor all the reporting tools he needed, and was only sorry the paper didn’t have a website so he could maintain his web presence. After completing one year at the Post, Wolf left the paper when he was accepted to the Master’s program in Journalism at Berkeley. He expects to receive his degree in 2011.

I asked Wolf if he considered himself an anarchist. He suggested I tell him what I thought an anarchist was, and he would tell me if that did or didn’t fit him. That didn’t go much of anywhere, but I did find out his father was an anarchist, and that he finds the label “social libertarian” to be more acceptable in some communities.

Before the July 8, 2005 incident, Josh was only planning only to gather a series of videotapes that he vaguely thought might lead to something. Before law enforcement intervened he was free to operate as it suited him. His work was “Hunter Thompson-esque,” he said. “You’re definitely not completely removed, there’s no detachment at all, and there’s no neutrality but you’re not exactly the one throwing the brick through the Starbucks window, either.” Since his career took off, he has run for mayor of San Francisco, worked at one of the only independent daily papers in the Bay Area, and is now attending the Bay Area’s top Journalism program. One hopes that Wolf will remain true to his roots. One indication he hasn’t changed his tune came when he said to me, “Objectivity is bullshit!”

Photo Assistant: Charles Slay

http://joshwolf.net