When are people observing official doings real journalists and when are they annoyances to be ushered away by the cops?
A recent federal court decision supports the idea that First Amendment protections extend not to journalists as a special class, but to anybody engaged in journalism.
This from reason.com.
This is good news for Justin Pulliam, a citizen journalist suing the Fort Bend County, Texas, sheriff’s department, but it should also be welcomed by anybody interested in free expression and holding government accountable.
The Institute for Justice announced this week:
Justin Pulliam, a citizen journalist arrested while covering Fort Bend County Sheriff’s deputies, won a first-round victory in his civil rights lawsuit brought by the Institute for Justice (IJ).
A federal district court rejected the sheriff’s attempt to dismiss the case. Pulliam will have the opportunity to hold the sheriff and his deputies responsible for violating his First Amendment rights to record the police and to be treated the same as established media or other members of the public.
U.S. District Judge David Hittner of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas summarizes matters well when he opens his order with the words:
This is a civil rights case. Plaintiff Justin Pulliam (‘Pulliam’) is an independent journalist who films activities of public interest, including police interactions with civilians.
That is, the plaintiff in the case is a journalist because he does journalism by filming police activities and uploading them to Corruption Report, his YouTube channel. This is important because Pulliam filed his lawsuit after his ejection from a press conference in July 2021 because he was “not media” and, in December of the same year, being arrested while recording police interaction with somebody experiencing a mental health crisis.
Judge Hittner wrote:
Based on the facts alleged in the complaint, it appears Pulliam was singled out and arrested for exercising his rights under the First Amendment.
That is, Pulliam is protected by the First Amendment
not because of a special status, but because everybody is.
I.J. attorney Christie Hebert stated:
The heart of the First Amendment is the right to speak out about government, and Fort Bend County does not get to pick and choose who will cover their activities.
The case still has to go to trial, so Pulliam hasn’t yet won. But he demonstrated that constitutional rights are at stake which precludes the sheriff’s department’s claims of qualified immunity. That’s an important step forward for the case at hand, but also a big win for Americans exercising their right to scrutinize government.
We’re at a moment when many name-brand media outlets are very closely aligned with the people exercising coercive power over our lives, and some of the best watchdogging comes from those who, like Pulliam, live outside the professional journalism club. Their efforts are often unwelcome.
James Alan Anslow, a British academic specializing in media observed a decade ago:
Journalism is an activity which, when pursued with vigour and executed with skill in a spirit of disruptive yet creative mischief, should represent the antithesis of ‘professionalism,’ of regulation. It should be the enemy of any contracted code of behaviour outside those codes imposed on all citizens and enforced by criminal and civil law.
Who is to determine which individual is a professional and which is not?
Many people do ‘a bit of journalism’ just as some do ‘a bit of politics’ or ‘a bit of art’. Some of them do it well. Some not so well.
And that brings us back to Justin Pulliam, who does “a bit of journalism”—enough to get under the skin of the local sheriff, judging by his ejection from press conferences, arrest, and subsequent lawsuit.
Maybe he does it well, and maybe he doesn’t—it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that a federal judge recognized that his activities are protected by the First Amendment, and that he has recourse against officials who try to stop him from observing and reporting on their conduct.
All of us have reason to root for Pulliam. He was pretty clearly targeted because he annoyed local officials and law enforcement with his coverage of their conduct.
If that is the case, it makes him a victim of official misconduct. We should also root for him because he’s helping to answer a question that’s increasingly important in the modern world: Who is entitled to the protections that come with being a journalist?
The correct answer is that we are all entitled to those protections when we do journalism.
