Rem Rieder

USA TODAY

Freedom of the press is under siege in Ferguson, Mo.

Two reporters, one from The Washington Post and one from The Huffington Post, told of being roughed up and apprehended briefly for nothing more than literally recharging their batteries at a McDonald's. They weren't at a crime scene. They weren't in the way of the police. They identified themselves as reporters. But police saw fit to order them out of the McDonald's, and when they didn't move quickly enough for the officers' taste, they were arrested.

That's not all. Police fired tear gas at journalists from the cable news channel Al Jazeera America. Al Jazeera said its staffers were easily identifiable as working journalists, and that police continued to fire even after they shouted "press." After the journalists fled, officers took down their television lights.

A photojournalist with St. Louis television station KSDK, filming an altercation in which the police were involved, had his camera hit by a "bean bag round" fired from a rifle. KSDK journalists say they were never told to leave the area.

Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, has been gripped by tension since an 18-year-old African American named Michael Brown was fatally shot on Saturday afternoon. Protests have engulfed the majority black suburb, and police have responded in a very aggressive fashion.

It's vitally important that Americans receive as richly detailed a picture as possible of what is happening in this fraught situation.

To do that, they need journalists on the scene to chronicle the events. But the journalists can't do their jobs if they are harassed and obstructed by the police.

Make no make mistake, this isn't just a problem for journalists. The First Amendment is a critical element of American democracy. The American people suffer when it is trampled.

To their credit, journalism organizations are fighting back. Mike Cavender, president of the Radio Television Digital News Association, wrote a letter to Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson decrying the treatment of The Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and The Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly. He said such treatment of journalists was "unconscionable and must be stopped immediately."

"The journalistic community is demanding that you, other command officials and all law enforcement officers involved in this continuing situation respect the rights of reporters and other journalists to provide news coverage in Ferguson so long as they operate legally -- which these two reporters were doing," Cavender wrote. "Harassment and abuse of anyone in a similar situation cannot be accepted and must not be tolerated by you and others charged with maintaining the peace and security in Ferguson."

Said National Press Club President Myron Belkind, "In the United States, it is not acceptable to prevent reporters from doing their jobs, let alone to knock them around and throw them in jail and then release them as if nothing happened."

Al Jazeera America said in a statement that it was "stunned by this egregious assault on freedom of the press that was clearly intended to have a chilling effect on our ability to cover this important story."

Adding some silliness to a quite serious situation, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, co-host of Morning Joe, said Lowery and Reilly should have just done exactly what police told them to do and that the journalists simply "want to get on TV."

We'll give the last word to Lowery.

The Post journalist told CNN's Kate Bolduan, "I would invite Joe Scarborough to come down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he's sitting and sipping his Starbucks smugly."