Another Citizen-Journalist Arrested in Texas for Threatening Officials with… Journalism

​Jeff Davis County in Texas is almost the size of Delaware. Home to the Davis Mountains, it is a place of stark beauty and small towns.
 
Covering this vast region is The Big Bend Times, “news for the Trans-Pecos,” a website with strong social media reach, amassing 285,000 followers on Facebook. It carries news about local jobs, business openings and closings, economic development, and local feature stories. It currently features a poignant and frightening account from a county politician about how he and his family barely escaped the recent floods in Central Texas.
 
With content like this, it is easy to see why regional public radio and other news outlets often turn to The Big Bend Times and its independent publisher, David Flash, for stories and leads. The Big Bend Times helps many far-flung communities keep up with developments in this vast region, including the public meetings of local officials.
 
Carlos Nogueras Ramos in the Texas Tribune reports on an incident at one such meeting held by Jeff Davis County commissioners on June 27. Flash set up a camera and then moved around the room, taking photos of the commissioners meeting from various angles. He had previously been banned from coming within 300 feet of county officials, employees, and buildings over “claims of harassment and terroristic threats.” Flash denies that he harassed or threatened anyone, unless you count news coverage of public figures as such.
 
In this incident, the sheriff warned Flash that his movements were distracting the commissioners. Ramos reports that after Flash tried to take a photo of a deputy sheriff, she handcuffed and forcibly removed him. Flash was later hit with a charge of “disorderly conduct.”
 
In many ways, Flash’s case is reminiscent of that of another Texas citizen-journalist, Priscilla Villarreal of Laredo, who was arrested for “misuse of official information”’ – reporting police information about a fatal traffic accident. While undergoing the booking process, Villareal reported that she was subjected to jeers and ridicule by the police, many of whom did not consider this citizen-journalist with a Facebook news site to be a “real” journalist.
Officials question whether Flash should also be treated as a journalist. Although he has a journalism degree, Flash’s LinkedIn page shows him serving as the sales and marketing director for a steam cleaning company. But his status as the publisher of a news site should render that question moot.
 
More important than his status as a journalist, however, is Flash’s status as a citizen, freely exercising his rights under the First Amendment. Texas law, like those of most states, allows any citizen to record any open meeting.
 
To be fair, there are signs in Ramos’ account that Flash may have distracted the hearing with his pacing around. Public commissions in Texas do have the right to impose reasonable rules of decorum in hearings. But his treatment was surely an overreaction.
 
So what might one conclude from this case?
 
First, local officials in Texas (and elsewhere) need to do a better job of acquainting themselves with the First Amendment. There is no reason for officeholders to get flustered, panicked, and angry when they are confronted by a journalist. Second, Flash’s management of a news site should dispel any questions about his status as a journalist protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. Third, there is perhaps too much focus on the “journalist” part of “citizen-journalist.”
 
You have the right to ask your public officials questions, and to memorialize their public meetings with a camera, whether you consider yourself a member of the press or not.
 
Perhaps the most important part of the moniker “citizen-journalist” is “citizen.”

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