Far from the Madding Crowd
Social Media Turned A Journalist’s Life Upside Down. But Was There More To the Story?
Outcry
In the early morning hours of 21 Janaury 2022, in response to a tweet no longer visible to the general public, a Twitter account using the handle @MustyBalaclava sent a tweet reading “yeah that was fucking unreal. she staged the entire thing, talked shit, and a chud streamer recorded it all 😂 video id - photographer, maranie rae, stages a photo op in which a child throws a mask into a burn barrel. the fire is being put out, she helps the child find a mask.”
In the tweet was included a video of an anti-mask protest during the Covid-19 pandemic that was held in downtown Portland, Oregon, in the midst of which stood Maranie Rae Staab. Staab, a photographer whose work had previously appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker and other media outlets, had been the recipient of a fellowship from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting two years previously.
At the 22 second mark of the video, a man in a red hat is heard saying “He [referring to a young boy present at the protest] wanted to throw one out.” The man is apparently referring to a mask that a young boy in the frame wanted to burn and then a woman's voice (not Staab’s) says “this lady's going to take a picture of you.” 33 seconds into the video, Staab says “I'd give you this one but these guys are watching me and they’re going to yell at me,” a reference to far-left protesters also present at the event who had been harassing, threatening and assaulting Staab for some months at this point (more of this to come). Staab does not produce a mask. At the 42 second mark, another man gives the boy a mask and he throws it in a barrel to the bizarre delight of a woman who appears to be his mother as Staab takes a photo.
In subsequent tweets, @MustyBalaclava account asserts “the source video is from a far-right live streamer, and monitored/screen recorders by local antifascists for relevant material. i appreciate the journalism community picking this video up. this photographer has a history of problematic behavior at events.”
It took over a week, but the video from an anonymous Twitter account finally begun to make the rounds among Staab’s fellow journalists, who assailed Staab for what they charged was her breach of professional ethics. Perhaps the most widely shared tweet came from Ryan Christopher Jones, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photojournalist who linked to the original video from the @MustyBalaclava account, adding, in his own words “Abhorrent behavior from a so-called “journalist.” Jones’ tweet was shared over 60 times and “liked” over 200 times. The podcaster Robert Evans wrote “Incredibly fucked up. Maranie was caught staging a mask burning. Footage is gross.” Hannah Yoon, a photographer based in Philadelphia, responded to Jones’ tweet with one of her own, commenting “I’ve had issues with her practices as a journalist for a some time now… but this just takes away any credibility she supposedly had before. If editors are still working with her…” followed by a quadruple vomit emoji. Carlos Bernate, a photographer based in Richmond, Virginia, wrote in reference to protests in Colombia in 2021 that Staab had also covered “And y’all can’t even imagine what she did while in Colombia. Claiming herself to be the ‘voice of the voiceless’ because she cover a couple riots and always over exaggerations of what actually went down during the protest. No respect for others! No ethic!” This prompted a response from the @MustyBalaclava account that read “Carlos, my DMs are open if you’d like to share more about this. we’ve heard whispers of people having problems with her in Colombia, but details are hard to come by all the way up in Portland.” In a since-deleted Tweet, the photographer BP Miller, who runs a digital photography studio called Chorus Photography, alleged “LONG history of sketchy practices...not the first time she's been called out for it” before going on to write “You really want to piss her off, accidentally pronounce her name wrong. You’ll never hear the end of it.”
The professional fallout was immediate and severe. On 2 February, Reuters sent out a Tweet announcing ”ADVISORY: We are deleting tweets containing photos with the byline Maranie Staab that are associated with Reuters articles.” In an article written by Jaron Schneider and published on the website PetaPixel, which focuses on digital photography and cameras, Schneider wrote that Staab had been seen “coordinating a photo with a woman and a child” before going on to report that Getty Images had confirmed “that it pulled the photo from its service and terminated its relationship with Staab when it became aware of the video.” A more nuanced article published on the website of the National Press Photographers Association (NPAA) by Sue Morrow took the time to actually speak to Staab and include her comments. In the text, Staab said “I own it. I own my mistake. And I shouldn’t have filed that picture with Getty. Hard stop.” The article concluded with the thought that Staab’s “career may forever be impacted, but that doesn’t mean she can’t do personal work. Alternatives do exist and the healing process begins with contrition by Staab and understanding from those who are willing to move forward.”
But was the dynamic at the protest - and the merciless trial-by social media that followed - as black-and-white as it was depicted at the time?
The Photographer
I met Maranie Staab, briefly, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the summer of 2019, introduced by a mutual Puerto Rican photographer friend. We had some drinks and discussed journalism and the island for about an hour and a half. It’s the only time we have ever met in person. I had followed her work from a distance since then, and when the whole mask controversy erupted, it was hard to square the thoughtful, sincere person I had met with the caricature being painted on social media. I wrote a short response to it on Twitter at the time, but as months passed, I decided to dig deeper as the incident seemed to me emblematic of a larger phenomenon on social media, one in which we pitilessly demand punishment for the transgressions, real or alleged, of others but hope for forgiveness and understanding for ourselves.
A native of Pittsburgh, Staab came to photojournalism after several years working at a human resources company, a decision that was accelerated after a 2012 auto accident in which Staab, a former collegiate long-distance runner, broke both her legs. In April 2016, Staab worked in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, the world's largest camp for Syrian refugees, after obtaining permission from two medical NGOs, the Syrian American Medical Society and Global Outreach Doctors.
“To see 100,000 people in this small space and realize that the world had largely stopped talking about the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis had a pretty profound affect on me,” Staab told me when I spoke to her over the phone this past summer.
In June 2016, she worked near Erbil, Iraq, taking photos that were used by the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières. That autumn, she returned to the Middle East, this time to Lebanon. In May 2017, she returned to Iraq during the Battle of Mosul, as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces ousted the Islamic State (ISIS) forces from the city. Her photos of the human toll of that battle appeared in The Atlantic and other publications. Watching a 7 year-old Iraqi girl named Zainab die following an airstrike was a searing moment.
“They were sending drones on these buildings that maybe had ISIS on the roof but were also full of civilians, men, women, children,” Staab recalls. “There’s no education that can prepare you for being out in the world and seeing these things firsthand. I was the only [foreign] person that knew that little girl would die. These deaths went unacknowledged.”
From 2018 to 2020, Staab attended graduate school at Syracuse University. In late 2019 and early 2020, she worked covering what Christmas was like for migrants in limbo in the Mexican city of Matamoros on the U.S.-Mexico border, and the struggles of migrants on the Greek island of Lesbos in the middle of winter.
Back in Syracuse, Staab began covering the protests that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. By July of that year, she was in Portland, where the vortex of clashes between far-left and far-right protesters had grown most severe, and which then-president Donald Trump had made a showcase for his unsuccessful culture war and security pitch for reelection, flooding the city with federal law enforcement, including the Department of Homeland Security’s secretive Rapid Deployment Force, as part of what was dubbed Operation Diligent Valor.
“I had never seen anything like what I saw those first few nights [in Portland] in the disproportionate and indiscriminate response by law enforcement against both protesters and members of the press,” says Staab.
Staab moved to Portland and dove headfirst into covering the ongoing clashes that continued throughout the summer and into the autumn. It was in the context of these protests that Staab first encountered the far-left protesters who used the tactic known as black bloc, garbed all in black and usually masked and often notably hostile to journalists.
The City of Roses
The political dynamic into which Staab entered was a complicated and volatile one.
Despite its more recent reputation as a redoubt of the far-left, Portland, sometimes nicknamed The City of Roses (or, less grandly, Stumptown), has a far-longer legacy as a place where the far right has exercised a sometimes lethal free rein. In November 1988, Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian student, was murdered by three white supremacists who were members of the White Aryan Resistance terrorist organization. In May 2017, white supremacist Jeremy Joseph Christian stabbed two men, Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, to death and grievously wounded a third, Micah David-Cole, aboard a MAX Light Rail train when they intervened following his racist attack against two black teeneagers. This past June, the African-American owner of a Portland food truck was brutally assaulted by a white man in what is believed to have been a racially-inspired attack.
The Portland Oregon Police Bureau, as the city’s police force is called, also has a chequered history. In 2001, Kendra James, an African-American woman, was fatally shot by police in circumstances that remain the subject of fierce debate. In 2006, James Chasse, a mentally ill homeless man, suffered 16 broken ribs and a punctured lung in the course of a confrontation with Portland police, injuries from which he later died. In 2010, a Portland police captain was suspended without pay after an internal affairs investigation found that he had brought “discredit and disgrace upon the Bureau” by festooning a tree in the city’s Rocky Butte Park with “memorial plaques” paying tribute to Nazi-era soldiers. In July 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice said that the department was violating its own use of force policies in contravention of a 2014 settlement with the Department governing the way it interacted with individuals with actual or perceived mental illness.
During the summer of 2020 and into the following year, Portland became the scene of frequent violent clashes between groups like Proud Boys and armed right-wing militia members on one side and supporters of political currents and groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter on the other. In August 2020, Aaron Danielson, an American supporter of the far-right Patriot Prayer group, was shot and killed in Portland by far-left activist Michael Reinoehl, who himself was later slain by law enforcement in Lacey, Washington, some 118 miles to the north. That was the same month then-17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men, two of them fatally, during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
On 28 July 2020, Staab wrote in a public Facebook posting that, she had been “thrown to the ground by a DHS (Department of Homeland Security) officer while standing on a public sidewalk, working as a photojournalist.”
“A grown man in military attire, outfitted for war, was compelled to put his hands on me, unprovoked, and push me to the cement,” Staab continued, noting that in the few days she had been in Portland, she had “witnessed numerous physical assaults at the hands of Portland police and federal officers, protesters and a journalist be shot in the face with ‘less-lethal’ munitions.”
Despite being in town for only a brief time, Staab had already drawn the attention of some. In August 2020, a Twitter account using the handle @kpasamacxn wrote that Staab was “Israeli intelligence tasked/contracted to block ACLU assistance regarding Whistleblower and prolong the protests for US Army Intervention. Failure to Eject her would be FISA action.” At an August 2021 event, Staab was assaulted by masked and helmeted self-described “anti-fascist” protesters as she approached to speak to their group. The protesters charged that, by covering 2021 protesters in Colombia, she had “endangered people by flying [there] and opening them up to Covid,” and then shot paint and mace at her, threw her on the ground, told her to “get the fuck out,” called her “a snitch” and then shot more paint at both her and the other press helping her. At the time, in response to the assault, the @MustyBalaclava account - the same account that would share the video of the mask burning protest five months later - responded supporting the violence and arguing that “maranie was repeatedly antagonistic in her approach to the bloc. people fear for their safety, both right and left, and press jeopardize that safety. a ‘PRESS’ badge is not a magical shield of safety.” Video of the incident clearly shows Staab being assaulted by black bloc protesters. Another Twitter account, @Alaska_Dee, wrote - falsely - of the incident “fash-adjacent journalist Maranie Rae, being maced right in the face from behind by her own people Sunday.”
[If she was carrying water for the far-right, Staab picked an odd way of doing so, as one of her photos - of self-proclaimed Proud Boy Alan James Swinney pointing a loaded firearm at left-wing counter protesters in downtown Portland in August 2020 - was used as evidence in Swinney's trial, which saw him sentenced to 10 years in prison for of assault, menacing and unlawful use of a weapon.]
“They got in my face about not taking pictures. I stood my ground and was attacked,” Staab says of the black bloc protesters. “At the time [colleagues] were supportive. At the same time, [some] saw me as a bit rogue. The toll that that summer took on us is very difficult to describe. I had been physically assaulted by the cops, by people on the right and intimidated and assaulted by people on the left. I was done succumbing to these kids running around in black telling me what I could and couldn’t take a photo of on a public sidewalk.”
The following month, someone stole Staab’s car, packed with gear for her to go report from the Caldor Fire in California, though Staab doesn’t believe the theft was related to her clashes with the far-left.
Staab is hardly unique in being assaulted by ostensibly anti-fascist protesters. Previously, that May, the Portland-based alternative weekly Willamette Week reported, “a participant in a daytime police brutality protest tackled WW contributor Justin Yau, clawed at his face, and broke his glasses.” A Chicago Sun-Times reporter was assaulted by black bloc protesters in that city in January 2017. In August 2017, a photographer was assaulted and beaten with a pipe while reporting on a far-left demonstration in Berkeley, California. In Washington, DC in August 2018, protesters from the far-left political current assaulted and threatened reporters attempting to cover dueling protesters during the anniversary of the far-right’s homicidal “Unite the Right” rally and riot in the city.
“This shit fucks people up and they are not dealing well,” a longtime Portland resident familiar with the protests and the struggles of the city told me when I spoke to him about the dynamic that had developed between Staab and the protesters. “[The black blocs] lash out and try to push someone else under to keep their head above water There is so much pain…Their beef with Maranie was that she was documenting people who were in bloc and there are two kinds of people who are doing that: People who are doing that to prove what people in bloc are doing and people who are doing it to prove what is happening to people in bloc. And there are people in bloc whose attitude is ‘I don’t care what their motivation is. I’m getting up to trouble and I don’t want it captured by anyone.’...The people who had a beef with Maranie were like ‘We draw that line by you never recording me ever’.”
It was in this context that the January 2022 mask protest and the subsequent viral video clip took place, and it was in this context, as Staab tells it, that her verbal statements in the video were misinterpreted by many who watched it unaware of the dynamic leading up to that moment.
“I had been in Pittsburgh and I had just come back,” says Staab. “I was on assignment for Getty Images and was excited for this assignment. It was a mask barbecue, if you will. I was by myself [and] I was harassed and targeted almost upon arrival [by the black bloc protesters] because I was not wearing a mask even though I had had two Covid shots and it was outside. I was followed around, told to put a mask on which I eventually did hoping they would leave me alone”
“What that video shows is there was a mother and son. The fire had almost gone out, but the mother wanted a picture with her son. What is heard in that video is ‘I’d give you mine, but these guys are watching me.’ That sounds sneaky, but what that meant was the mom was looking for a mask for the little boy and that was my way of saying ‘I can’t give you mine because these guys are watching me’ because they were watching me, and the these guys in this instance referred to black bloc. And the second thing I say is ‘You don’t have to look at me.’ That’s very different from me finding a mask and staging a picture.”
“We are all faced with myriad complex situations when out in the field as journalists,” Staab continued when I spoke to her. “This was a missed opportunity to have very real and very important conversations about what happens in the field. That is separate from ‘What did Maranie do and what repercussions are deserved here?’ It was an opportunity to discuss ‘How could she have handled this better?’ Should I have filed that with Getty? Probably not, because I had interacted a bit. However, the context matters, the intention matters. My intention was not to deceive anyone. I am heartbroken that my career has imploded because of what was a genuine mistake and what could have been remedied in any other number of ways.”
Aftermath
Some photographers see more nuance in the episode than was initially depicted on Twitter.
“Ideally the photographer is just a fly on the wall and people just do what they do,” said the photographer Stephanie Keith when I spoke to her earlier this year about the incident. “The photojournalist is not supposed effect the scene at all. She broke that rule…[But] we all make mistakes when were out in the field and if we had someone livestreaming everything we ever did they probably would find something that makes us look bad.”
There also appears to be some fluidity among the photojournalism community about what does and does not constitute interfering with the production of a genuine photographic record, fluidity that seems largely contingent on political ideology.
Ryan Christopher Jones, Hannah Yoon and Carlos Bernate, who all harshly criticized Staab, are signatories to the “The Photo Bill of Rights,” which describes itself as “a fundamental step in changing our industry and gaining rights and access for all” and advises signatories to accept that “right language leads to right thinking.”
The Photo Bill of Rights contains passages that could be viewed as directing photographers to influence scenes they are photographing, including one that instructs photographers in “fast-paced situations like protests, in situations that are rapidly evolving, or situations unbalanced in power for the source like an immigration case or a criminal proceeding” to approach those being photographed any inquire “Do you feel safe with me making your photo at this time?” and then listening “for a confident yes or leave,” and also inquiring of those in public spaces “Do you feel comfortable with me documenting you today?” It is hard to view these instructions as not trying to curate real-time events through the intervention of the journalists ostensibly reporting on them, even if it is apparently being done in the service of the “right” cause, in the view of the signatories.
During the writing of this essay, I reached out to Hannah Yoon, Carlos Bernate and BP Miller, all of whose tweets made specific allegations of wrongdoing relating to Staab’s work as a photojournalist. Yoon did not respond. In an email, while noting that he had “never worked with [Staab] personally,” Miller said that he “just had a couple of shitty interactions with her and that was enough for me.” He also stated that the had heard “stories circulating around [Staab] about setting up shots” but provided no details or specifics. Staab says she has “no recollection” of any unpleasant or substantive encounters with Miller. I spoke with Carlos Bernate over the phone, where he provided more context for his initial criticism.
"I saw her during one of the demonstrations [in Colombia in 2021] but I never worked with her," said Bernate, who hails from Bucaramanga, Colombia, when I spoke to him this month about his tweet. "The whole thing started because I saw a couple of problematic Instagram posts."
In particular, Bernate said he took issue with a photo that Staab took of two protesters kissing which she captioned “The protest you don't see.”
“That particularly offended me because that post right there kind of destroyed what other photographers have done and gone through in Colombia for decades. I'm not trying to destroy her career, because she's not the only one who has done that. I wish this is a conversation we could have not just about her but about many other photographers, as well.”
Through it all, Portland has continued to struggle with its own demons. On 19 February 2022, 60 year-old activist June “T-Rex” Knightly was killed and five others were wounded when Benjamin Jeffrey Smith opened fire on a demonstration near Portland’s Normandale Park in remembrance of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old African-American man who had been fatally shot by a Minneapolis Police Department officer earlier that month.
On 30 October 2022, a Twitter account using the handle @RisingPDX [which periodically locks its account, screenshots of the following tweets are included in the the body of this essay] began a tweet thread referring to Staab and another reporter who had worked in Portland, Mason Lake.
“Overnight anarchists in Portland were able to monitor the locations of two journalists who have snitched and put several people in our community in danger,” the rising @RisingPDX account asserted. The thread went on to boast “These 2 Journalists are now in need of new windshields and paint jobs. To Maranie Rae Staab and Mason Lake we say that you have been warned time and time again and it’s time to Find Out, if your seen in our spaces these acts will continue.” before concluding “Mason Lake and Maranie Rae have both been given numerous warnings and this is just the start of Finding Out if either of you are seen in any Radical spaces moving forward. - Anonymous.”
The continuing threats - and actual violence - against Staab and other journalists by black bloc attracted virtually no attention, despite how they might have impacted the interpretation of the initial video and her actions in it.
“I watched what happened on Twitter as the tweet gained traction with leftists and others, but the worst part was watching the journalistic community take every opportunity to dogpile me,” Staab says. “What was being said quickly became very personal and wasn’t even related to the issue at hand. With the exception of Sue with the NPAA, with the people who were passing judgment, no one reached out to me. Quite a few heavy hitters who had a platform did what they did. It was devastating. Not only the professional ramifications, [but] to be publicly shamed and mischaracterized and have something as fundamental as your character put on trial publicly with no opportunity to defend yourself, really affected the core of who I am.”
Since the social media furor around her that January day nearly two years ago, Staab has continued to try to use her skills as a photographer in different contexts. In the Spring 2022, she traveled to Ukraine, which had just been subjected to an imperialist invasion by the forces of Russian dictator Vladmiri Putin, to document that work of World Central Kitchen, the non-governmental organization founded by Spanish chef José Andrés that works devoted to provide meals to communities in times of crisis. She then returned to Ukraine for part of June and July 2022 working on the visual component of a reconstruction needs assessment for the market research and consulting firm Ipsos Group S.A. and The World Bank,
By the summer of 2023, after a major surgery, Staab had decided to leave Portland. As she was getting ready to leave, her truck and U-Haul, parked outside her building and waiting for the morning’s drive, were broken into. Someone shattered her window, broke the lock to the U-Haul and stole her bike.
Conclusion
What lessons are we as journalists and as social media consumers to take from the furor that erupted around a protest that happened in Portland now nearly two years ago?
One of the first is that no pressure group - not far-left or far-right - gets to determine what journalists are and aren’t allowed to cover on the streets of our cities or anywhere else. In a city such as Portalnd, which is nearly 74% white and where an absence of journalistic coverage inevitably and inescapably helps hide from scrutiny the activities of a long-dominant group to whom, whether they they like to admit or not, the vast preponderance of protesters in the city, both right and left, belong, such a spotlight is doubly important. In more than 20 years as a journalist, I have watched too many heroic reporters in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, Mexico and elsewhere give their lives for the free flow of information to assent to its strangling by small groups of totalitarian fanatics here at home.
We should also consider how the intense personalization of critique and counter-critique that social media lends itself to - and, indeed, encourages - often works to obscure deeper conversations we might have about problematic behaviors and aspects of our work and social dynamics. It is extremely easy to join in for the public crucifixion of someone online, and to make claims which, upon further interrogation, cannot be backed up by any direct evidence, and there is relatively little fallout from doing so. We frequently ascribe the worst possible motives to those we disagree with - and strip their experiences of history and context - while asking for lenience and forbearance when explaining our own actions. This needs to change.
The dynamics of viral video moments are often more complex than the few seconds or minutes contained therein that spread unchecked across the internet and we, as journalists and as a society as a whole, would all do well to delve into them more deeply before engaging in the by-now-ritualized denunciations of those portrayed as wrong-doers for the transgressions they have or are alleged to have committed. Perhaps there is a way for us to pause and gather all the facts and then see if there is a more productive mode of critique we can employ to make us all better at what we do, rather than focus on the personal destruction of individuals we believe have transgressed in some way.
And perhaps we need to extend to others the level of grace, empathy, patience and understanding that we would want for ourselves for, as the Czech author Milan Kundera’s wrote in in his 1967 novel The Joke, “to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.”
To be read attentively all the way to the end with Milan Kundera's crucial quote.