The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
Massachusetts has long been notorious for being one of the least progressive states with regard to government transparency. The state’s public records law is alone in exempting the governor’s office, the Legislature and the judiciary, leaving cities, towns, counties and the state’s executive agencies as the only government bodies that may be compelled to produce documents when requested to do so by journalists or members of the public.
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What’s worse, there are few penalties for failing to comply with the law. As John Hilliard observes (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe:
Michael Morisy, the chief executive of Boston-based MuckRock, who’s been helping people file public records requests for years, told the Globe: “It’s among the worst states when it comes to public records access.”
U.S. Justice Department. Photo (cc) 2006 by Coolcaesar.
Should a judge be expected to know when a prosecutor’s request is illegal? I would have thought so. But that turns out to be not the case with regard to a Washington Post reporter whose home was raided by the FBI last month as part of a leak investigation targeting a Pentagon contractor.
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New York Times reporter Charlie Savage reported recently that the Justice Department had failed to tell a judge that a 1980 federal law prohibited the government from seeking a journalist’s reporting materials in most instances. Because of that failure, the judge issued a warrant to search the home of Post reporter Hannah Natanson — a shocking move given that journalists are generally summoned to court and given an opportunity argue against being forced to turn over their documents.
As current and former faculty members at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, we condemn the unconstitutional arrests of independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. We are instructors, mentors and colleagues of young journalists, and we believe it is imperative that we stand up for the vital role of a free and unfettered press in a democratic society.
The Justice Department has filed charges against Lemon and Fort for the crime of committing journalism when they accompanied activists who entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18. The activists were there to protest the pastor’s alleged employment by ICE. The journalists were there to observe, to live-stream the proceedings and to interview participants, church members and the pastor before leaving the church. In so doing, they engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment with the goal of informing the public about the Trump administration’s deadly and illegal occupation of the Twin Cities.
As Amnesty International put it: “Journalism is not a crime. Reporting on protests is not a crime. Arresting journalists for their reporting is a clear example of an authoritarian practice.” We call on the Justice Department to drop all charges against Lemon and Fort and to acknowledge the centrality of journalism in holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.
Note: Our statement was published earlier this morning by The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper.
Belle Adler
Rahul Barghava
Mike Beaudet
Matt Carroll
Myojung Chung
Ellen Clegg
Charles Fountain
John Guilfoil
Meg Heckman
Carlene Hempel
Marcus Howard
Jeff Howe
Dan Kennedy
William Kirtz
Catherine Lambert
Laurel Leff
Peter Mancusi
Meredith O’Brien
Jody Santos
Alan Schroeder
Jeb Sharp
Dan Zedek
The Trump regime has taken direct aim at the First Amendment, arresting four people — including two journalists — for their role in a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month. The journalists are Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor who’s now independent, and Georgia Fort, an independent reporter based in the Twin Cities who recorded her thoughts just before she was arrested and posted a video on Facebook.
Lemon and Fort accompanied protesters as they made their way inside a church to protest what they claimed were the pastor’s ties to ICE. They were there to live-stream and report on what happened, and the Department of Justice hasn’t produced a scintilla of evidence that their activities went beyond that. This is a grotesque violation of the First Amendment. I’m tempted to say that it’s shocking, but it’s not. Stunning?
Here is yet another independent journalist, former Washington Post reporter Philip Bump, on Bluesky:
The thing about this is that I don’t know a single journalist who will be intimidated by Don Lemon being arrested? But, then, that’s not why the administration is doing this. The founders couldn’t have imagined a president violating core freedoms for the purposes of social-media accolades.
The Committee to Protect Journalists weighed in earlier today.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly condemns the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for their reporting on a protest in Minnesota, arrests which mark a serious escalation of attacks on the press in the United States.
“This is an egregious attack on the First Amendment and on journalists’ ability to do their work,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “As an international organization, we know that the treatment of journalists is a leading indicator of the condition of a country’s democracy. These arrests are just the latest in a string of egregious and escalating threats to the press in the United States — and an attack on people’s right to know.”
Lemon, who formerly reported for CNN and now publishes on Substack, was arrested Thursday night; Fort, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, was arrested Friday morning. Both arrests were in relation to their coverage of a protest at a Minnesota church led by local activists against immigration enforcement operations in the state.
Lemon was arrested in Los Angeles, where he was reporting on the Grammy Awards. Here is what his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, had to say:
Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done. The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.
Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case. This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.
Update, Jan. 31. The Washington Post has published a visual investigation of Lemon’s activities at the church. As you’ll see, it’s pretty unremarkable — Lemon enters, interviews people and leaves.
Barack Obama’s administration threatened reporters with jail if they refused to turn over their confidential sources. But he didn’t order raids on reporters’ homes. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
Back in 2012, I wrote an opinion piece for The Huffington Post (now just HuffPost) that I headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.” The premise was that Barack Obama, like George W. Bush and other presidents before him, was disrespecting the First Amendment’s protection of independent journalism by taking reporters to court and theatening them with jail if they didn’t reveal the identities of White House sources leaking to them.
At least Obama, Bush et al. were following a legal process. As The Associated Press reports, Donald Trump’s FBI, headed by the buffoonish but dangerous Kash Patel, raided the home of a Washington Post journalist to grab what they claimed were classified documents provided by a Pentagon contractor.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has been harshly criticized for his handling of the government shutdown. Photo (cc) 2024 by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
We’ve been hashing out the pros and cons of ending the government shutdown on Facebook this week. My position has been that the Democrats shouldn’t have caved, but that it was a close call. Certainly the shutdown couldn’t have gone on too much longer, especially with families in danger of going hungry and federal workers not receiving paychecks.
More than anything, I didn’t see any possible way that the Democrats could achieve their stated objective of forcing Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to extend health-care subsidies. The government could have stayed shut for six more months and that wouldn’t have changed.
Imagine, if you will, a public school, supported by taxpayer dollars, claiming that it’s a private corporation and doesn’t have to comply with the state’s public records law. It is absurd on the face of it. Yet that’s what the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School is arguing in a case before the Supreme Judicial Court.
According to an account by Jennifer Smith in CommonWealth Beacon, at least two of the justices appeared to be unimpressed by the Malden-based school’s claims when the case was argued at a recent hearing.
“You’re in real trouble,” Justice Scott Kafker told Charles Waters, a lawyer for the school, explaining, “It quacks like a duck, it waddles like a duck, it paddles like a duck.” Added Justice Dalia Wendlandt:
I understand charter schools were created to be independent in certain ways, to foster innovation in education and have the ability to do that in a way that the average public school does not. Good. But that doesn’t carry you to the argument that they’re not subject to the public record law.
At issue are some 10 instances in which public records were sought by a Facebook-based local news organization called the Malden News Network, Commonwealth Transparency and Malden mayoral candidate Lissette Alvarado. Smith reports that the requested information includes “corporate statements, contracts, ledgers, lease records, conflict of interest disclosures filed by board members, payments made to employees or professional services, and confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements.”
The case dates back to mid-2023, when state Attorney General Andrea Campbell filed a legal action against the school to force it to comply with the public records law. For fighting so stubbornly to conduct the public’s business behind closed doors, the Mystic Valley school has earned a New England Muzzle Award — its second. In 2017, I awarded a Muzzle to the school for discriminating against Black students by banning long braids and dreads. In 2022, the school sent a female Muslim student home because she was wearing a hijab in violation of the student dress code.
Despite the school’s reputation for academic excellence, there is clearly a culture problem that needs to be addressed.
According to Smith’s report in CommonWealth Beacon, Mystic Valley is claiming that it’s not subject to the public records law because “Charter schools, in their view, are public schools that are structured and treated in some ways more like corporations.” Among those disagreeing is the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association. Then again, Mystic Valley is one of just three charter schools that are not members of that organization.
In an editorial (sub. req.) calling for the SJC to rule against Mystic Valley, The Boston Globe observes that the school has already lost in decisions rendered by the state supervisor of records, the attorney general and a Superior Court judge. The editorial concludes: “Charter schools have been a great asset to Massachusetts families; indeed, Mystic Valley has been ranked as one of the best schools in the state. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is that the public has a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”
Even as major media organizations like ABC’s parent company, Disney, and CBS’s, Paramount, were settling bogus lawsuits filed by Donald Trump in order to demonstrate their submissiveness, an unlikely defender of the First Amendment has emerged: USA Today Co., which until earlier this week was known as Gannett.
A federal judge on Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit charging that Gannett’s Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer committed fraud when they reported days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris held a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa. As you may recall, the poll results created a sensation, but they turned out to be wrong: Trump won Iowa by 13 points, which was about what you’d expect.
The class-action suit was brought by a resident of West Des Moines named Dennis Donnelly, who claimed that he and other Register subscribers were victims of fraud because the Register acted with “intentional deceit or reckless disregard,” according to Emma Brustkern of WFAA-TV.
The suit is similar to one brought by Trump himself against Gannett, the Register and Selzer (he later dropped Selzer from the claim), calling the poll “brazen election interference.” That is, of course, a ridiculous allegation. More than anything, pollsters want to get it right, but sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes, as in the case of Selzer in 2024, they get it very wrong. As U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger writes in her decision:
No false representation was made. Defendants conducted a poll using a particular methodology which yielded results that later turned out to be different from the event the poll sought to measure. The results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false represention merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.
Trump’s own lawsuit is likely to meet a similar fate. So good for USA Today Co., which has shown a stiffer spine than some other media companies. Rather than allowing itself to be used by the Trump regime as a way of weakening the First Amendment, it is standing up to authoritarianism.
Larry Bushart under arrest. Photo by the Lexington, Tenn., police department via The Intercept.
Larry Bushart is free, but he didn’t win. It was the forces of oppression that won after Bushart spent a month in jail, held on $2 million bail, for publishing a provocative Facebook post about the late Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump that Tennessee authorities decided to conflate into the felony of recklessly threatening mass violence at a school.
Bushart was released from jail Wednesday after public pressure began to build, reports Rick Rojas in The New York Times. A retired law-enforcement officer who obsessively posts liberal memes, Bushart’s offense was to publish a photo of Trump following Kirk’s murder accompanied by the words “We have to get over it,” which was a statement Trump made in 2024 after a fatal school shooting in Iowa. A line under the photo read “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after,” along with “This seems relevant today …”
Surveillance footage of ICE goons grabbing Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts last March.
Fifty-five student news organizations have signed on to an amicus brief challenging the Trump regime’s use of federal immigration law to revoke the visas of international students and deport them for speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
The brief was filed by a coalition led by the Student Law Press Center and joined by the Associated Collegiate Press and the College Media Association. Among the student news outlets lending their support to the brief are nine from New England, including our independent student newspaper at Northeastern, The Huntington News. The others:
The Dartmouth, at Dartmouth College
The Harvard Crimson
The Heights, at Boston College
The Mass Media, at UMass Boston
The Mount Holyoke News
The Trinity Tripod, at Trinity College
The Tufts Daily
The Yale Daily News
In addition, 11 student newsroom leaders, including one from Bates College in Maine, have signed as individuals.
“You’re in real trouble,” Justice Scott Kafker told Charles Waters, a lawyer for the school, explaining, “It quacks like a duck, it waddles like a duck, it paddles like a duck.” Added Justice Dalia Wendlandt:
