It’s not a good day for the First Amendment, as four New York Times journalists have been subpoenaed in connection with their report (sub. req.) that Donald Trump’s new Air Force One plane — a gift that he corruptly accepted from the Qatari government — lacks important security features.
The journalists have been called to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday. Although the exact nature of the inquiry hasn’t been revealed, it’s probably an attempt by the Trump regime to determine who leaked the information to the Times.
This morning, though, I want to call your attention to a more blatant violation of the First Amendment: a judge’s demand that a New Jersey newspaper remove school security footage from its YouTube channel and refrain even from writing about it. On Thursday, the judge softened his order slightly but then extended it to all news outlets.
The paper, New Brunswick Today, reported that school officials sent a note to parents of high school students falsely claiming that a routine security drill had been held after a student attempted to bring a BB gun into the school that morning. As Charlie Kratovil reports, “The city’s school district lied about an incident where a student attempted to bring a weapon to school on the morning of May 8 at New Brunswick High School, characterizing an unscheduled lockdown as a ‘school security drill.’”
NBT, as the paper is known, obtained and published security video showing the student with the weapon. In response, the school system took the paper to court. The Freedom of the Press Foundation reports on what happened initially and with the new order:
Judge Thomas McCloskey had previously granted an emergency order that required New Brunswick Today to remove from its YouTube channel a security video from a local high school that it received from a confidential source and to refrain from writing about the video.
The video showed a school security guard confronting a student who tried to pass through metal detectors with an airsoft BB gun, causing the school to go into lockdown. The court’s previous order also prohibited the newspaper from publishing any other school security videos.
In a July 9 order, McCloskey refused to lift the prior restraint entirely, though he limited it in some respects. The order allows New Brunswick Today to publish and write about the video at issue, but only if it redacts the faces and other identifying information of minors from the video and refrains from identifying them in writing.
There is no more serious a violation of the First Amendment than out-and-out censorship. If anyone broke privacy rules in this instance, it was whoever provided the video to NBT, not the news organization. At one time, judges agonized over whether the First Amendment allowed them to stop publication of information that might make it easier for rogue nations to build an atomic bomb. Now we have a rogue judge in New Jersey imposing censorship over a BB gun.
According to a police report obtained by NBT, the student in question is a 16-year-old who’s been charged with false alarm, possession of an imitation firearm and possession of a weapon in a school. In other words, these are not insignificant offenses that the school system was trying to cover up.
As First Amendment lawyer Caitlin Vogus, an adviser to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, put it in an op-ed piece for NJ.com: “People have a legitimate interest in knowing whether school security measures are working and whether school security officials are responding appropriately to threats. The footage published by New Brunswick Today would have allowed the public to evaluate those questions for themselves, rather than relying on official explanations.”
The New Jersey Press Association blasted McCloskey as well, saying, “That kind of order, where a government agency uses the courts to stop a news organization from publishing news, is one of the most serious threats to the free press that exists. It lets those in power shape the story on their own terms, without scrutiny or challenge from reporters on the ground.”
It’s worth noting, too, that Judge McCloskey referred to the video as “proprietary video footage of the school system.” What is that supposed to mean? Is he going to toss in an allegation that NBT violated copyright law, too?
I hope McCloskey’s rulings are appealed and reversed — and that the judge is ordered to attend a class in remedial freedom of the press.
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Doesn’t sound like an open-and-shut case to me. There are issues around publicizing accusations against minors and privacy rights accorded to students and other members of the school community. Which does not mean that the courts are the correct place to apply these protections, just that there are other factors at play here.
Those privacy rights are legally protected by school officials, not by the press. There is nothing to stop news organizations from identifying minors who’ve been charged with crimes other than ethics and custom. In this case, school officials lied about what had actually happened, which means that NBT’s reporting shed light on the actions of those officials, not on the kid with the BB gun.