At an anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco in 2005, police and demonstrators clashed. Josh Wolf, then 23, videotaped the whole thing. When he refused to turn over his tapes to a federal grand jury, Wolf was jailed for 226 days—longer than any journalist in U.S. history for protecting sources. While still in federal prison, he was awarded a Journalist of the Year Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Since his release, Wolf has run for Mayor of San Francisco, appeared on Colbert, and worked as a reporter at the Daily Post, a free daily in San Mateo County.
A self-styled independent journalist with a cinema verité approach to covering protests, Wolf follows controversy—and controversy follows him. His critics say his involvement in advocacy discredits him as a journalist. In November, he locked himself inside Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley with a group of students protesting the UC tuition hike. Now a student at the Graduate School of Journalism, Wolf faces possible suspension as a result—though he maintains he was there strictly as member of the press. He has contributed footage of UC protests to Democracy Now!, the J school website Oakland North, and national networks including ABC News.
I sat down with Wolf in the sun-splashed, wisteria-festooned courtyard of the J school, where we met last fall as classmates in the documentary program.
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The Rumpus: Maybe we should start with some Josh Wolf-style transparency. Should we be transparent? We’re kind of friends.
Josh Wolf: We’re both students at the journalism school, and certainly friends. At what point do you end up having to disclose that? By the end of the year I had at the Post calling [San Mateo County DA Steve Wagstaffe] every day, I felt like he was kind of a friend. Reading about him in the stolen iPhone scandal, I feel like calling him up and being like, “Hey buddy, what going on here? Have you talked to your brother Jim about this?” When you know the DA’s brother is a first-amendment attorney named Jim, that kind of goes beyond the standard source relationship. But we don’t hang out. I haven’t called him in the year since I stopped working there.
Rumpus: Did this issue come up at Wheeler Hall?
Wolf: I didn’t know the people at Wheeler Hall.
Rumpus: But you’re in trouble now for being in collusion with the people at Wheeler Hall.
Wolf: The University acknowledges that my role there was as a member of the press. I’m certainly not neutral about my tuition going up, but I can honestly say that I didn’t know the vast majority of those people until I found myself locked in a building with them, covering what they were doing. The New York Times ran a story that mentioned that the UC police said that they didn’t see a press badge around my neck. Lo and behold, after that article ran, the Student Conduct Office had another conversation with UCPD where they said, yes, in fact, we saw the press badge. The University’s perspective isn’t that I wasn’t there as a journalist, it’s that it doesn’t matter—that student journalists are students before they’re journalists.
Rumpus: You seem to find yourself in situations as a journalist where questions about your involvement in activism are raised. Is that an issue that you’re intentionally forcing?
Wolf: I have never violated any protocol or code of conduct for any for any publication I’ve ever worked at. For the most part, my activism consists of finding stories that I think are important and don’t get attention and self-publishing about them. I think that can be construed as activism. I mean, clearly I’m going to self-publish about things that I think need attention. I think there is an editorial decision—there is a bias there. To commit journalism without an economic engine is a form of activism. But I think it’s ludicrous to think that because I publish things without an established outlet I should be precluded from working with other publications. That’s just paradoxical.
Rumpus: How would you characterize your coverage of what’s going on at UC?
Wolf: I’d definitely say my relationship to the larger issue of student protests is not at the level that the New York Times would feel is appropriate. It’s somewhere between gonzo journalism and embedded journalism. And I do have a perspective—I don’t like paying more for tuition that I can’t afford. But I don’t think that my coverage is any less honest, and I think that I’ve been quite truthful about my perspective. I think that that’s the line for, “What is journalism?” I don’t think that journalism is about not being involved and not having a perspective, I think it’s about disclosing your perspective when appropriate and necessary. It’s actually more necessary than is done. No one discloses when they report on a bank robbery that they think bank robbery is a bad thing—but they probably do. We just don’t go that far. Maybe we should. Maybe when you report on McDonald’s earnings for the business section of your paper, maybe you should mention you had a Big Mac for dinner.
Rumpus: Where does the decision about your suspension stand?
Wolf: They offered me a formal censure instead of a suspension—I could just keep myself out of this issue and get on with my schooling. But I think there’s a policy shift that needs to happen. The University should be an atmosphere where student journalists can freely cover what’s going on in their University the same way that journalists from outside the student population could cover it. Just because they let me off with a warning this time, what about next time? I don’t want to be in a position of saying, “I could cover that, but the University could kick me out of school. Let me call my friend and give this story to him because he’s not a student.” At the point that we have student journalists feeling they can’t cover important stories, then we have a crisis of press—of democracy—on our campus. I can’t just take the warning.
Rumpus: We’re being taught by people who were at the Washington Post and the New York Times. Has the faculty been supportive of you?
Wolf: Definitely they’ve been supportive. In terms of the teachers that are coming from the straight-and-narrow, old-school news approach, one teacher’s perspective is the only thing we need to know about ethics is, do I want a job? From that logic, I guess I made an ethical slip if this is going to prevent me from getting a job. At the end of the day, we’re citizens first and journalists second. This old-world way of thinking that you surrender parts of your role as a citizen because you’re a journalist seems antiquated and not really sensible. We have this idea that journalism is this lifestyle that involves not taking a stand on anything.
Rumpus: That you’re always under contract as a journalist.
Wolf: That your duty as a journalist is to not have an opinion or pretend that you don’t. There’s this great big lie. Journalists are often the most opinionated people I know, but they build their careers on pretending they’re not, and there’s something greatly dishonest about that. To me the basic tenets of journalism are honesty and transparency. This neutrality—when you’re not really neutral—goes against both of those.
Rumpus: So that’s your project. You’re trying to change that paradigm, for the future Josh Wolfs?
Wolf: For the future everyone. For the person who watches Fox News and thinks it’s fair and balanced. There are people who think Stephen Colbert isn’t a comedian. We have a crisis of media literacy and we have perpetuated this lie that journalists are neutral. Our capital is based on being these dis-invested individuals and I think we need to change that. We all have investments. We all have perspectives.
