Larry Wilson: The fight to keep a free press free

When we were in our early 20s — that period when you’ve graduated from college, and are figuring out what to do — Susan Seager and I were copy messengers in the grand old Los Angeles Times building downtown.

Really three buildings patched together over many decades, Times Mirror Square took up the entire block between Spring, Broadway, First and Second. It was an amazing maze, and the old and the new edifices were patched together with doors and hallways that sometimes it seemed only we copy kids knew every inch of, and the ways to get from here to there fastest. In a way, we were also the only ones with a reason, an excuse, to go everywhere and interact with everyone, from the massive machinery of the press room on the first floor to Otis Chandler’s publisher’s suite in the penthouse facing on to First, as what we did was literally carry copy — written on typewriters, unfurled from the carriages by the sometimes cigar-smoking crusty old reporters, who actually would yell “Copy!” and expect us to be there to convey it within seconds to some editor somewhere else in the building.

Or, if it was a long take, and said editor or typesetter was far away, we’d glue together a number of the pages, roll them up and place them in pneumatic tubes that whisked them around the place. It was steam punk, it was the movie “Brazil” in real life, and from time to time it was a lot of fun. You got to visit with some amazing people, and sometimes, as the great books editor Art Seidenbaum several times did for me, they’d toss you an assignment and your own byline would be in print. You felt you had some small part in the daily miracle that was putting out a great newspaper.

Susan soon moved on to become a superb reporter for UPI, the wire-service rival of the AP. Then Susan went to law school, and now does something perhaps even more important than plain journalism: Her practice  is in protecting journalists’ First Amendment rights.

She directs the Press Freedom Project at UC Irvine, and when working reporters were arrested while doing their job during the recent Gaza war protests at UCLA, she jumped into the fray and demanded their release.

And while they were in detention, she warned coppers holding journalist Sean Beckner-Carmitchel that it would be illegal for them to search any of his recording devices.

“Sean had the right to film police even if police had set up police lines or even if they had declared a curfew,” Susan said in an interview with the L.A. Times. “It appears he was arrested for simply filming UCLA police conducting arrests or completing arrests of students in a public parking lot,” Seager said. “The arrest of Sean is illegal, period. He wasn’t interfering with police.”

It was clear to observers that the LAPD, notorious for its ill treatment of working scribes covering political demonstrations, and other law-enforcement agencies were targeting Beckner-Carmitchel and another arrestee, William Gude, who the Times called “a prominent police critic in L.A. who regularly records officers on the street for his many social media followers,” for exercising their First Amendment rights.

I’m so proud of Susan’s work, and of a May 1 editorial written by my colleagues at UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian after four Daily Bruin reporters were assaulted by the counter-protesters at UCLA, pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed: “We call on UCLA’s administration to protect their student journalists. It is the community’s duty to safeguard the students who are putting themselves in harm’s way to keep them informed.”

Still nice, most days, to be in an important line of work.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com