The Pentagon is no longer content to manage information. According to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times, it now wants to control the press itself.
 
In a sweeping First Amendment challenge, The New York Times and national security reporter Julian E. Barnes have sued the Department of War over a new press-access policy that would allow Pentagon officials to revoke journalists’ credentials for publishing stories the government disfavors – even when those stories rely on unclassified information obtained entirely outside of the Pentagon complex.
 
At the center of this case is a new rule for PFACs – Pentagon Facility Alternate Credentials – the badges that have allowed reporters to move around the building and cover briefings, hallway encounters, and day-to-day operations for nearly 80 years. From World War II to 9/11 to Iraq and Afghanistan, that access has been essential to independent reporting on the military.
 
Under the new rule, Pentagon officials can immediately suspend and ultimately revoke a journalist’s PFAC if they conclude the reporter has “solicited,” received, or published “unauthorized” information – even if the information is unclassified and the newsgathering happened entirely outside the building.
 
Such punishments would have clearly aimed to prevent The Washington Post’s scoop that a secondary missile strike killed survivors on a presumed drug-smuggling vessel. This is a revelation so disturbing that some leaders of the Republican-controlled House and Senate are demanding public disclosure of an unedited video of the boat strike.
 
Would the public and Congress be better off not knowing about these strikes? That sort of “unauthorized” – read: embarrassing – journalism appears to be precisely what this policy is designed to deter.
 
Even routine acts of reporting are swept into the danger zone. Asking questions of Defense Department employees, or publicly posting a call for tips on social media, can be deemed “solicitation” and used as grounds for revoking a reporter’s credentials.
 
Worse still, this policy authorizes officials to pull access for vaguely defined “unprofessional conduct that might serve to disrupt Pentagon operations.” The Times says this gives Pentagon leadership “unbridled discretion” to punish disfavored reporters and outlets – exactly the sort of standardless power courts have repeatedly said violates both the First and Fifth Amendments.
 
The Pentagon compounded the crackdown on the media by demanding that reporters sign an “acknowledgment” stating they had read and “understood” the policy. Journalists from nearly every major news organization refused, warning that signing would legitimize a system that punishes routine newsgathering. As a result, they turned in their PFACs and lost day-to-day access to the building.
 
The New York Times, perhaps predictably, criticized the Pentagon’s inclusion of the “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” – which includes, commendably, new and wider media. But, as The Times notes, it also includes influencers friendly to the administration. The lawsuit argues that this is not a neutral security policy, but a viewpoint-based press-access regime.
 
If the policy takes hold, The Times warns, the longstanding adversarial tension between press and government will collapse. It will be replaced by a system in which only approved narratives are permitted, forbidding stories like the missile strike on survivors of a sunken boat, conducted in the name of the American people.
 
That would not be press oversight. That would be press censorship.

​The University of Alabama shut down two student run-magazines – one for women, one for Black students. Why? The university holds that these publications’ targeting of readers among its 43,000 students constitutes unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

The theory suggests that the university is acting to protect Crimson Tide men who are writhing in pain from their exclusion from Alice, “the University of Alabama’s fashion and lifestyle magazine.” The same can be said for all the white, Asian, and Latino students who are in agony over their exclusion from Nineteen Fifty-Six, a publication dedicated to “Black culture, Black excellence, and Black student experiences.”

In other words, the university is singling out these publications for directing content to women and African-American students, which sounds a lot like – and is – viewpoint discrimination. “You cannot have a more blatant First Amendment violation here,” Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center, told the student-run The Crimson White.

We would add that it would be hard to have a more profoundly stupid violation, either. This ranks up there with the decision by the U.S. Naval Academy to protect its non-Black students by removing Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from its library.

Why is this happening? Universities have an understandable desire to stay on the right side of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. To be fair, DEI ideology and administrative departments had become domineering presences in campus culture and speech, threatening academic careers over faux pas and linguistic misdemeanors. A correction was certainly needed, but we are now veering into overcorrection.

The University of Alabama is acting on its interpretation of a July 29 memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi. That memo included “non-binding suggestions” to help institutions that receive federal funds avoid “unlawful proxies” and “ostensibly neutral criteria that function as substitutes for explicit considerations of race, sex, or other protected characteristics.”

Somehow, that has become a directive to avoid any channelization of communication or free association between Black Americans (12 percent of both the U.S. and the University of Alabama population), and women (51 percent of the U.S. population and 56.5 percent of that university’s population). Taken literally, any lawful interest magazine would have to cater to everyone, of all races, both genders, of all backgrounds, faiths, and national origins. Maybe Fencepost magazine, courtesy of the American Fence Association, fits the bill. (Although some might find its “modern wood designs that keep us coming back” a tad bit risqué.)

The bottom line is that the university’s actions constitute blatant viewpoint discrimination – one of the clearest violations of the First Amendment imaginable.

We draw this conclusion from the U.S. Supreme Court in Rosenberger v. Rector, which slammed the University of Virginia in 1995 for denying standing to a Christian-based student publication. The Court majority’s abiding concern was viewpoint discrimination, not that somehow non-Christians would be discriminated against by the publication’s existence.

A society based on free speech is one that respects pluralism – Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, women, men, gays and non-binary folk, fashionistas, sci-fi geeks, and football fanatics. An effort to enforce an artificial homogeneity is not anti-discriminatory. It is just a new form of discrimination: viewpoint discrimination.
​
We would not be surprised if between the time we post this piece and you read it the university will have listened to its lawyers and reversed these twin cancellations rather than face these students in court. As Nick Saban said, it’s never okay to lose a game.

Enraged by The Marion County Record’s reporting on a public document about a restaurateur’s DUI, officers of the Marion, Kansas, police department and the local sheriff’s department raided the newspaper, and seized its computers, servers, and cellphones. Editor Eric Meyer had his home raided while his 98-year-old mother Joan – a former editor – watched the police ransack her home in great distress.
 
Joan Meyer died the next day.
 
Marion County has now agreed to pay a total of $3 million to the victims of this raid in 2023 and to Joan Meyer’s estate. The Marion County Sheriff’s Office, for its part in the raid, issued an apology as well as a check:
 
“This likely would not have happened if established law had been reviewed and applied prior to the execution of the warrants.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation responded by saying:
 
“You think? Any police officer or judge with half an understanding of the First Amendment should’ve known better than to ask for or sign off on the raid on The Record and the home of owners Eric and Joan Meyer.
 
“But apparently, police don’t always read the law, and judges may need a refresher, too. Let’s break down the flashing red lights any judge or cop should heed before storming a newsroom.
 
“The First and Fourth Amendments strongly protect against searches of journalists and newsrooms.
 
“Under the Fourth Amendment, a search warrant must be supported by probable cause, which means a likelihood that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found at a particular place. The government must also specify the place to be searched and the thing to be seized.
 
“When a search warrant targets materials protected by the First Amendment — like notes, recordings, drafts, and materials used or created by journalists — the Fourth Amendment’s requirements must be scrupulously followed, the Supreme Court has said.
 
“This means that judges must be extra strict in applying the Fourth Amendment’s requirements when a search impacts First Amendment rights, which it will any time it involves a journalist or newsroom. What judges should never do is allow overly broad searches where police rifle through journalists’ desks and computer files willy-nilly in the hopes of turning up something ‘incriminating.’”
 
The Freedom of the Press Foundation also noted that Kansas, like most states, has a press shield law that would have required a court hearing before law enforcement could rifle through journalists’ confidential sources. The federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 requires law enforcement to obtain a subpoena, not just a warrant, thereby giving The Record an additional opportunity to challenge the demand in court.
 
The Freedom of the Press Foundation concluded:
 
“Journalists also have a right to publish information given to them by a source, even if the source obtained it illegally, as long as the journalist didn’t participate in the illegality. That means that if a source gives a journalist a document or recording that the source stole, the journalist can’t be punished for publishing it.
 
“Because these things are not crimes, it also means that accessing publicly available information or publishing information that a source illegally obtained can’t be the basis for a raid on a newsroom or search of a journalist’s materials.
 
“Next time, think before you raid.”

​The history of American journalistic liberty begins about 350 years ago, in the era of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When the British Crown gave the censorious Puritans a taste of their own medicine by ending their theocratic rule, printed dissent began to take root in the colony. Eventually, patriots like James Franklin and his younger brother, Benjamin, would push these ideas even further.

Massachusetts thus became the birthplace of America’s free press. No less than six anti-crown publications existed there on the eve of the Revolutionary War in 1775. At first, they were propelled by courage alone, but by 1791 a free press had become a foundation of the new republic. The Founders feared that without formal protections, freedom of the press wouldn’t mean much – and was therefore unlikely to last.

Which is why we're glad the inheritors of that rich tradition – the editorial board of The Boston Globe – recently pointed out a stinging historical irony: Massachusetts has failed to enshrine into law a fundamental journalistic right – the protection of confidential sources, the identity of whom prosecutors often demand. In fact, the board observes, a proposed press protection law hasn't even come to a floor vote in the state legislature for fifteen years. The Globe hopes this year will be different:

“The free press in a democratic society should not be expected to be a tool of the criminal justice system. It defies logic that prosecutors should feel the need to obtain reporters’ notes when they have vastly more power – via subpoenas and other means – to obtain information on their own.”

Libel and defamation laws will continue to protect us from shoddy journalism, they note to critics. Protecting confidential sources isn't simply a shield anyway – it's also an enabler of ethical reporting:

“Sound journalism requires that confidential information be verified in other ways – and when done properly, such reporting can reveal vital secrets about government, business, and other powerful institutions that the public has a right to know.”

Here's hoping Massachusetts remembers its proud history of press freedom and joins the 40 other states that have already protected confidential sources by statute. And wouldn't it be great if the federal government joined this little statutory party and passed the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS Act)?
​
Journalists have no protections in federal court from prosecutors seeking their notes and sources. If Massachusetts adopts a press shield, would Washington continue to remain far behind the states? Probably. But sometimes revolutions occur in small steps. Let the next step be in Massachusetts.

​The walkout over the Pentagon’s restrictive new press rules continues. On Tuesday, Fox locked arms with ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC to declare in a joint statement:

“We join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues. The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.”

As CNN’s Aaron Blake points out, Fox’s participation also represents a deeply symbolic rebuke of the former Fox News commentator: “This is Hegseth’s own former employer saying he’s undermining freedom of the press.”

It’s not like Secretary Hegseth was all that chatty anyway. As many outlets have reported, he has only given two briefings during his time in office:

“We're barely getting any information at all from the Pentagon,” wrote NPR’s Tom Bowman, a 28-year veteran of the Pentagon press pool, adding: “And there have been virtually no background briefings, which were common in the past whenever there has been military action anywhere in the world.”
​
Even the ever-acerbic Donald Rumsfeld, noted Bowman, gave press briefings twice a week. And, we might add, he was an actual wartime secretary.

​Et tu, Newsmax? 

We’ve held off writing about the Department of Defense’s restrictive new rules for Pentagon-beat reporters, waiting to see the results of intensive negotiations between the Department and journalists.

Now we know the results of those negotiations – by Monday afternoon, CNN, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR said adios to the E-Ring. Even Newsmax – not known as a bastion of mainstream media critics of President Trump – rejected the First Amendment-killing terms of the Pentagon’s new policy for beat reporters.
​

• The original policy issued Sept. 18 would have required journalists to sign a pledge acknowledging that they had to secure the Pentagon’s permission before publishing any information, including unclassified reports.

 

• A new version issued on Oct. 6 clarified that journalists do not, in fact, have to submit their writings for Pentagon approval. But it did warn journalists against “solicitation” – a word normally used by police when arresting johns for prostitution.

 

• The policy read: “Solicitation may include direct communications with specific (Defense) personnel or general appeals, such as public advertisements or calls for tips encouraging (Defense) personnel or general appeals, such as public advertisements or calls for tips encouraging (Defense) employees to share non-public (Defense) information.”

This language essentially forbids journalists from asking what, from an official standpoint, are “wrong questions.” Angela Fu of Poynter reported:

“In essence, the new memo shifts from attacking journalists’ ability to publish the news to attacking their ability to gather it, experts say. From a press freedom standpoint, the dangers of the revised version are ‘clearly no better’ than the ones in the initial version, said PEN America journalism and disinformation director Tim Richardson.”

Worse, restricting unclassified and politically sensitive information amounts to… oh, what is that phrase? Oh yes, “prior restraint” – the cardinal crime against the First Amendment.
​
Now a wide spectrum of journalistic outfits will be turning in their credentials and reporting from outside the building. In response, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a goodbye emoji:

​We applaud these news organizations, left, right, and center, for standing up to a demand to only publish approved news. We further predict this will turn out not to be a bright move for Secretary Hegseth. These journalists will no longer be seen walking the halls and checking in with the Pentagon’s press offices to get the official scoop. Instead, they will work their stories with smartphones, using encrypted messaging apps to cultivate insiders willing to dish out stories the Pentagon would probably prefer to keep under wraps.
​
We cannot think of a better way to encourage the kind of bad press that leads to trouble. We’ll see who gets the final bye-bye.

​Police in Allentown, Pennsylvania, have long drawn the scrutiny of civil libertarians over claims of excessive force and occasional brutality. Since 2015, the city has paid out more than $2 million in police misconduct claims.
 
Phil Rishel, a 25-year-old Allentown resident, is determined to drive home Allentown’s lack of training in the First Amendment for its police force. He has often filmed police to demonstrate the point that he has a constitutional right to do so. In one of his recent posts, in which Rishel filmed a police garage through widely spaced bars from a public sidewalk, an officer sternly told him that “filming is not a First Amendment right.”
Courts have long held the opposite – that a citizen’s right to film in public is a vital form of public oversight, as seen in the arrest of a citizen-journalist who dared to film a public hearing in Texas. (Here’s a good guide on your rights and suggestions on how to film the police from the ACLU.)
 
Rishel’s recent posts have blown up the internet in which he has an insulting interaction with a police officer in the garage. In that recent video, the officer loses his cool and drives his police car down the sidewalk toward Rishel, who gleefully films him. When the officer inadvertently bangs the side of his car against a sidewall, Rishel responds with profane insults about the officer’s intelligence.

​Rishel has beaten charges of “verbally abusing, harassing, and screaming obscenities on the public street.” Local courts have recognized that swearing and even flipping the middle finger amount to constitutionally protected speech. Now the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) is backing Rishel in his First Amendment lawsuit to protect his right to film and criticize police activities.
 
As Rishel tells an officer in his video, “there is no purer form of protest than on a public sidewalk.”
 
Well put. But can the same be said for Rishel’s pointed insults? They almost certainly fall far short of the Supreme Court’s “fighting words” threshold for what would constitute an actionable offense.
 
One likely – and commendable – result of this incident will be enhanced First Amendment training for Allentown police. Still, we don’t feel like breaking out the champagne over this one. Yes, the U.S. Constitution protects Phil Rishel’s right to act like an insulting jerk who provokes police officers into overreacting. But provoking police officers in a very personal way – who are, after all, human – is not a good way to test the boundaries of the First Amendment.

​In any democracy, the justice system and the Fourth Estate are bound to clash. When they do, the clash often reveals much more about the status of constitutional freedoms than the details of a given case. Case in point, a headline from July 22 on Bloomberg Law: “Journalist’s Wiretap Prosecution Exposes First Amendment Risks.”

Here's the backstory behind a case fraught with First Amendment implications, one Protect The 1st has followed since 2022.

• Journalist Tim Burke obtained deleted clips from Tucker Carlson’s controversial interview with Kanye West when Carlson was still with Fox News. Burke then shared those with Vice and Media Matters for America, which published them. This was embarrassing to Carlson, who framed the interview as showing Kanye West – now Ye – to be an iconoclast worth listening to. The deleted portions were, to put it in strictly scientific terms, absolutely bonkers.

 

• Fox apparently invited this embarrassment by uploading the outtakes to a public online site and neither securing nor encrypting them. But that didn’t stop the Justice Department from raiding Burke’s Tampa home and seizing his electronic devices.

 

• Now the case against Burke is proceeding in a federal court in Florida. It represents, warns Bloomberg’s Holly Barker, an invitation for prosecutorial abuse, potentially turning what doesn’t even seem to rise to the level of misdemeanor molehills into felony mountains. The prosecutors’ “felonizer” here is an expansive over-interpretation of the Wiretap Act, which DOJ appears to be using to turn possible Computer Fraud and Abuse Act infractions into far more serious violations – 14 of them, to be exact.

At the heart of the case is the relevance of the First Amendment in the digital age – and, to a lesser extent, what constitutes a journalist in the modern sense and perhaps even the meaning of what is “public.” For the moment at least, the court is taking the case and these constitutional questions seriously, seeing it as the high-level referendum on freedom that it is.
Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle acknowledged: “Burke’s arguments raise novel questions with potential wide-reaching impact.”

An ACLU-led coalition, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have all filed amicus briefs outlining what’s at stake in this case.
​
Protect The 1st believes that making use of materials left in open view – whether posted online or put out on a public sidewalk – is in no sense a wiretap. Worse, the FBI raid on Burke’s home was overkill that deserves to be slapped down. We hope Judge Mizelle will stand for a free press and rule against this attempt by prosecutors to narrow the First Amendment.

Congress last week rescinded $1.1 billion earmarked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) – a move that severs federal support for National Public Radio (NPR) and its member stations.
Weeks before, in a lawsuit before a federal court, NPR claimed that an executive order by President Trump to cut off its funding was “textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment.” Does this view fairly characterize the subsequent vote of a conservative Congress to silence a media organization widely seen as left-leaning?
We say no. Protect The 1st firmly supports the congressional cut-off. Why we think so, however, has nothing to do with the prevailing partisan narratives of Washington, either of the left or the right.
 
Conservatives argue that NPR’s left-leaning reporting and the self-parodying ideological pronouncements of its president and chief executive officer, Katherine Maher, justify the cut-off. Among NPR’s top Washington-based editors, 87 are registered Democrats and exactly none are Republicans. This latter fact was revealed by NPR journalist Uri Berliner, who was pressured to leave after he issued a public essay in which he accused NPR’s bias of costing it the public’s trust.
 
During the 2020 election, NPR haughtily dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story (one editor declared “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories”). When NPR found itself on the chopping block before a Republican Congress, Maher apologized, “NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.”
 
All true. These are the viewpoints that had conservatives sharpening their axes. But we are unmoved by these concerns. We have a different, deeper problem with NPR: Regulating editorial viewpoints necessarily involves the federal government in the regulation of speech. We would also object if NPR had trimmed its sails to the prevailing wind and became an echo chamber of conservative media and the Heritage Foundation. Maher’s editorial pliability on the Hunter Biden laptop story demonstrates this potential for government influence over news coverage.
 
Our stand is simple: Government should not be in the business of subsidizing viewpoints. The law requires NPR to practice “objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” But objectivity and balance are subjective judgments that can never be well defined by a statute and regulated by law.
 
Defenders of NPR note that only 2 percent of NPR’s budget came directly from CBP and taxpayer dollars. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) demonstrated, these taxpayer funds were intermingled with funds from “left-wing non-profits looking to advance their own narratives in the press.” We add that “mega-donors,” be they left-wing, right-wing, or libertarian, have every right under the First Amendment to subsidize any speech they wish. The problem arises when American taxpayers are compelled to enrich those subsidies. Mingling the funds of private donors with the funds of the federal government is not a healthy elixir.
 
Unlike many, we take no joy in this moment. We hope that smart NPR content like Radiolab and news service to rural and underserved communities will continue. But we also see government-subsidized speech as inherently problematic. A government forbidden by the First Amendment from abridging the freedom of the press should also be forbidden from subsidizing the news – because official sponsorship of the news is the flip side of censorship.

​In a move that is drawing widespread condemnation and ignited a press freedom firestorm, Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Trump’s lawsuit over CBS’s editing of a “60 Minutes” segment. The settlement, which includes legal fees and a donation to Trump’s future presidential library, appears less like a legal resolution and more like a political payoff designed to grease the wheels of a corporate merger.
 
Seth Stern of The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), slammed the settlement as “a thinly veiled effort to launder bribes through the court system.” FPF is preparing a shareholder derivative lawsuit against Paramount’s leadership for what it sees as a betrayal of journalistic integrity and a violation of fiduciary duty.
 
Let's be clear: This lawsuit, based on a Texas statute “outlawing false, misleading, or deceptive acts or practices” in business is beyond a legal stretch. CBS aired edited clips from an interview with Vice President Harris – standard practice in broadcast journalism – with no evidence of factual inaccuracies.
 
The lawsuit claims that CBS hid the former vice president’s propensity for answering questions with nonsensical “word salad” answers – a breathtaking assertion of legal control over editorial decisions that are clearly subjective. If this standard were widely adopted, all manner of news and editorial content would become subject to adjudication.
 
The settlement only makes sense when you look at the bigger picture. Shari Redstone, who chairs Paramount, stands to gain if the company’s merger with Skydance Media goes through. Trump’s lawsuit, and his Federal Communication Commissioner’s opening of a “news distortion complaint” of CBS, created the leverage. Paying $16 million to settle this lawsuit starts to look less like a legal decision and more like a calculated move to secure the deal.
 
Seth Stern’s warning is especially apt: “Corporations that own news outlets should not be in the business of settling baseless lawsuits that clearly violate the First Amendment.” As Stern notes, this doesn’t just damage CBS’s credibility, it makes every newsroom in America more vulnerable to future intimidation.
 
To be sure, CBS has its journalistic flaws. Since the days of Dan Rather, some of CBS’s reporting has been comically biased against Republicans. But editorial bias is not, and must never be, a matter for governmental scrutiny or political reprisal. The First Amendment is not a quality control mechanism for press content. It is an absolute – “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of the press. It is a firewall between the state and the newsroom.
 
Conservatives should be especially wary of this precedent. If a sitting president can sue a media company over edits backed by the implied threat of merger obstruction, what stops officials in the next administration from doing the same to Fox News? Or your favorite influencer who gets under their skin?
 
This case should alarm anyone who values an independent press, even if they disagree with the views generated by such independence. When an administration uses the threat of regulatory power to extract money and editorial concessions from a news organization, it’s not just CBS on trial. If this strategy proves successful, every newsroom becomes a target, and every critical story a liability. And that’s flatly incompatible with the First Amendment.

​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.”

​Georgia Dillane did not attend the pro-Palestinian sit-in at Barnard College in March. She wasn’t out in the crowd; she was in the school’s WKCR radio studio anchoring a broadcast. Yet weeks later, she found herself accused by Barnard of “disorderly conduct, disruptive behavior, failure to comply, unauthorized entry, threatening behavior, and theft, vandalism or damage to property.” All for doing her job as a journalist.
 
Her colleague, Celeste Gamble, was at the scene, but only as a credentialed student reporter. She left when told by police to evacuate. There is no reason to believe she was anything but professional in her role as an objective observer. Yet, like Dillane, Gamble received emails from Barnard’s CARES (Community Accountability, Response, and Emergency Services) office demanding she meet without legal counsel to “refute any suggestion” of wrongdoing. Neither student had been disruptive. Neither had committed any known infraction. Yet they were treated as suspects.
 
Dillane’s offense appears to be little more than journalism. Her real “crime” was that a man later arrested by immigration authorities could be heard in her audio report. That connection, however tenuous, was enough to get her flagged as a potential wrongdoer just weeks before graduation, which had temporarily been put in jeopardy.
 
This is not an isolated incident. As we’ve noted in our coverage of Tufts Ph.D. student Rumeysa Orturk, moral panic over campus protests is now being weaponized against students with the flimsiest of links to the turmoil. Orturk, too, was no ringleader – just a signatory to a student op-ed, sober and serious, that was critical of Israel. Orturk was arrested and nearly deported before a judge intervened.
 
The recent spike in antisemitism on college campuses is real, troubling, and must be countered and kept from happening again. Hate speech and threats of violence must always be taken seriously by college administrations. But the solution cannot be to launch witch hunts against students who write, report, or question. Colleges and universities are where the principle of free inquiry – so foundational to our democracy – is meant to be practiced.
 
If journalism is rebranded as “disruption,” and if signing an op-ed becomes a pretext for arrest, we risk sliding from law enforcement into the realm of viewpoint persecution. Institutions like Barnard should be defending their students’ right to report and speak freely, not joining in the chorus of overreaction.
 
Even though New York’s shield law provides strong protections for journalists, including an absolute privilege for confidential sources, it doesn’t cover unpaid student reporters. Still, courts in the Second Circuit have found that student journalists can claim a qualified First Amendment privilege if they gather news for public distribution. Undermining their independence betrays both press freedom and the core mission of higher education.
 
In this age of guilt by association, the pursuit of actual wrongdoers can give way to the harassment of innocent people, even those who (unlike the two student journalists) have opinions we detest. We should remember freedom means protecting dissenters we disagree with, and standing up for process even when we’re angry. Otherwise, we lose not only our cool, but our constitutional compass.

​Sarah Palin’s long-running defamation suit against The New York Times came to an end last week, with a federal jury again ruling against her claims. The jury found, after just two hours of deliberation, that The New York Times had not defamed the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate by mistakenly linking her political action committee’s rhetoric to the mass shooting in Arizona in 2011 that killed six people and severely injured then-Rep. Gabby Giffords.
 
Of course, the media landscape today is fragmented and biased in ways that can frustrate fair public discourse. Outlets across the spectrum cater to their audiences’ ideological appetites, much as newspapers did in the early Republic. This partisanship is far from ideal, but the First Amendment still steadfastly protects it – even when bias tilts against conservatives.
 
In Palin’s case, The New York Times made an undeniable error when it published a 2017 editorial implying a link between the Arizona shooting and a map distributed by Palin’s PAC that contained congressional districts with stylized crosshairs. The mentally ill shooter had, in fact, a long-standing grudge against the congresswoman that predated the map. But mistakes, even careless ones, are not the same as “actual malice,” the standard set in New York Times v. Sullivan for public figures like Palin to prevail in libel suits.
 
The Times moved quickly, issuing a public correction less than 14 hours after publication and clarifying that there was no established connection between Palin’s map and the shooting. James Bennet, then-editorial page editor, tearfully apologized to Palin in court, acknowledging the mistake and his efforts to fix it. These actions matter. Corrections are not only an ethical obligation for journalists; they help defray the risk of defamation liability by showing good faith and a commitment to accuracy.
 
If Palin had prevailed in court, that ruling would have made corrections meaningless. Rather than encouraging media outlets to promptly and transparently acknowledge their errors, a Palin victory would have discouraged self-correction and made the political climate far more hostile to the open debate the First Amendment is designed to protect.
 
There is legitimate debate to be had about whether the Sullivan standard needs adjustment. There is clearly room in for more journalistic accountability in cases in which an untruth leads to the loss of an election or the termination of a contract. Courts and commentators alike have argued whether the line between public and private figures has blurred too much, making it unreasonably difficult for individuals to defend their reputations. Some argue that the precedent could use fine-tuning to address egregious falsehoods that are not caught by today’s high bar. But as this case shows, even high-profile plaintiffs can win under the current doctrine when facts warrant it – as Dominion did against Fox News.
 
Conservatives are right to be concerned about media bias. It is real and often glaring. But the answer cannot be to dismantle the constitutional protections that allow ideas – good, bad, and ugly – to compete in the marketplace. As we have written before, the solution lies not in empowering judges and juries to police editorial decisions, but in cultivating a discerning public that reads broadly and thinks critically.
 
The First Amendment guarantees a free press, not a fair one. Palin’s loss, while surely disappointing to her and her supporters, is a victory for that freedom, and for the principle that honest mistakes must not become fatal mistakes for a free and independent press.

​The Department of Justice has rescinded its policy shielding journalists from being compelled to produce records or testify in federal leak investigations. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo that the move is needed for “safeguarding classified, privileged, and other sensitive information.” The memo also reportedly discusses the danger of leaks that “undermine” the president’s agenda.
 
This is a step in the wrong direction. DOJ’s former policy was a laudable and necessary bulwark against government meddling in the collection and dissemination of free information. It is an own-goal for conservatives feeling wronged by lawfare and official censorship. The confidence of sources to expose secret transgressions made it easier for conservative journalists to reveal the IRS campaign to harass conservative non-profits during the Obama administration, for The New York Post’s to stand by its brave and lonely investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop, for the independent reporting of Catherine Herridge, and for Matt Taibbi’s exposure of the extent of social media censorship.
 
In recent years, we’ve seen federal intrusion into the records of the AP, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and even morning raids to confiscate the phones of activist journalists. For decades, journalists have been held in contempt and jailed for refusing to reveal their confidential news sources.
 
As a result, almost every state in the country has a “press shield” law that protects journalists’ sources and notes, with reasonable exceptions. But the federal government has no such law.
 
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press president Bruce Brown said in response to the decision: “Some of the most consequential reporting in U.S. history – from Watergate to warrantless wiretapping after 9/11 – was and continues to be made possible because reporters have been able to protect the identities of confidential sources and uncover and report stories that matter to people across the political spectrum. Strong protections for journalists serve the American public by safeguarding the free flow of information.”
 
That’s why there has been strong bipartisan support in the House of Representatives for the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act, passing it twice. The PRESS Act would prohibit federal authorities from spying on journalists through collection of their phone and email records while imposing strict limitations on when the government can require a reporter to give up their sources. It reasonably grants exceptions for emergencies.
 
In the Senate, the PRESS Act has strong bipartisan support, including from Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), as well as Democrats Sen. Ron Wyden (R-OR) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). But it has yet to make it out of committee.
 
Congress must act now. Enshrining protections for journalists is a logical policy fix designed to protect newsgathering, which is our primary means of directing the disinfecting rays of sunlight towards government corruption and malfeasance. Doing so would be consistent with the aims of the founders, who took great pains to ensure the First Amendment had a place of primacy in the Bill of Rights. And it would protect against increasing constitutionally illiterate, illegal acts by government officials against reporters. 
 
General Bondi promises that warrants should “limit the scope of intrusion into potentially protected materials or newsgathering activities.” That is a subjective and potentially politicized assessment. We need a brightline rule. Laws to protect journalists’ notes and sources have worked well across America’s red and blue states. The PRESS Act will work just as well in Washington, D.C.

​Student journalists and their supporters across the United States are celebrating the eighth annual Student Press Freedom Day. This year’s theme, "At the Forefront," emphasizes the resistance of student journalists and the challenges of prior restraint, censorship, and even the threat of arrest they face. How these challenges are met today will shape the future of tomorrow’s journalism, already facing stiff challenges from collapsing business models and social media fragmentation.
 
Student Press Freedom Day, organized by the Student Press Law Center, brings together students, educators, and press freedom advocates to raise awareness about the struggles of student journalists. Participants advocate for legal reforms, such as “New Voices” laws, which safeguard student journalists from administrative censorship.
 
Consider how the University of Northern Iowa handled student journalists, imposing unconstitutional prior restraint by requiring resident assistants to obtain approval before speaking to the media. The student newspaper, The Northern Iowan, exposed this policy, leading to its revocation and earning the publication the First Amendment Award at the Iowa College Media Association Awards.
 
Student Press Freedom Day also shines a light on precedents that threaten student press freedom.
 
The 1988 Supreme Court decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier weakened protections for high school journalists by allowing administrators to censor school-sponsored publications if they could justify doing so for “legitimate pedagogical concerns.” Though the ruling was meant to apply to K-12 institutions, its logic was later extended to colleges in Hosty v. Carter in 2005. In that case, the Seventh Circuit Court ruled that a university could exert prior review over a student newspaper if it was not designated a public forum.
 
Courts have also upheld the rights of college journalists. Over the past four decades, more than 60 cases have addressed censorship in public college and university student media, with decisions consistently affirming that the First Amendment prohibits most administrative censorship of student-edited publications.
 
The challenges faced by student journalists are not limited to administrative censorship. In 2024, Stanford University student journalist Dilan Gohill was arrested while covering a protest after following demonstrators into the university president's office. Despite wearing a press pass and acting in his capacity as a reporter, Gohill faced potential disciplinary action and criminal charges. After seven months of uncertainty and advocacy from First Amendment groups, Stanford President Jonathan Levin confirmed there would be no disciplinary action from the university.
 
With changing business models and a polarized society, quality, independent journalism struggles to exist. Whether or not quality journalism can continue will require, at the very least, cultivating young reporters and editors who are free to learn their chosen profession by practicing it without restraint.
 
Protect The 1st is pleased to join student journalists in celebrating Student Press Freedom Day.

​The city of Clarksdale, Mississippi, sued the Clarksdale Press Register for publishing an editorial that criticized officials for allegedly failing to provide public notice regarding a hearing on a local “sin tax.” The editorial in question began: “SECRECY, DECEPTION ERODE PUBLIC TRUST.”
 
Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Crystal Wise responded by ordering the newspaper to take down the column.
 
In her order, Judge Wise said the case involved “defamation against public figures through actual malice in reckless disregard of the truth and interferes with their legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality during this current legislative cycle.”
 
Perhaps Judge Wise could benefit from a few hours reading The First Amendment for Dummies. The “actual malice” standard in legal jurisprudence protects journalists from libel suits, requiring a public figure to prove: 1) that a defendant knew a statement was false; or 2) that a news outlet acted with reckless disregard for the truth. It’s one of the most basic, foundational protections for free speech in the United States, allowing for unfettered coverage of public figures without fear of legal reprisal.
 
There was at least one question of fact: Was there a reckless disregard for the truth by the newspaper? Not according to a city clerk, who submitted an affidavit admitting that she failed to send a routine notification of the public meeting to the newspaper. As for what else Judge Wise thought was illegal about the Press Register’s opinion column – that remains unclear. Since she didn’t hold a hearing before issuing her order, it’s anyone’s guess.
 
After the ruling, Clarksdale mayor Chuck Espy lauded the decision, writing on Facebook:
“Thank GOD! The City of Clarksdale WON today! The judge ruled in our favor that a newspaper cannot tell a malicious lie and not be held liable. The newspaper had to take down a false story that they printed. The only thing that I ask, that no matter what you print, just let it be the truth; be it good or bad. Thank you GOD for a judicial system.”
After the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and its lawyers became involved, the mayor withdrew his suit. And thank God for that!
 
In the meantime, Mayor Espy and other officials should keep in mind that when the courts fail, the internet’s Streisand Effect always kicks in to punish would-be censors.
 
Protect The 1st looks forward to seeing this editorial hot off the press when it is reprinted by The Clarksdale Press Register.

​You might like, laugh at, or deplore the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. One thing that cannot be disputed is that the administration’s new designation has spawned the sale of innumerable T-shirts.
 
Private organizations are free to adopt or not adopt the administration’s terminology. Google, for its part, enacted a diplomatic solution. Use Google Maps in the United States and you will find that it reflects the new name – Gulf of America. But Google Maps users in Mexico will find that the old name, the golfo de méxico, is intact.
 
The AP news organization does not have the luxury of splitting names in its reportage. It stuck with the old name, as do most Americans. This makes sense, given that Mexico’s Gulf coastline is longer than that of the United States. Now AP says the White House has informed the news organization that because AP “did not align its editorial standards” with the executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico, “AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.” An AP reporter was later blocked from an executive order signing.
 
AP says that these actions violate its First Amendment rights. It remains to be seen whether courts will hold that this action violates the letter of the First Amendment. AP can argue that the White House is engaged in viewpoint discrimination, even if about access to a limited public forum. This kind of petty play and attempts to direct editorial policy from above is a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment.
 
Those who advocate such a muscular approach to press relations were the first to protest attempts by the recent progressive administration to strongarm corporations, universities, and media into language policing. We were told to refer to America’s Latino population as “Latinx” (which most Latinos hated), to women as “birthing persons,” and to pronoun policing. The Trump press office would do well to discontinue the tradition of heavy-handed language control.

​The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) that steered advertisers away from conservative American publications has shuttered after being stripped of its funds by Congress.
 
In its heyday, with a $61 million budget and 120 employees, GEC oversaw a $330,000 grant from affiliated entities to the UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). It also made direct grants to GDI. This organization then distributed blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding websites that put out what it regards as “disinformation.” GDI also identified the ten “riskiest” news outlets – The American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
 
A GDI insider told The Washington Examiner that publications on the “riskiest” list were probably also on an “exclusion” list sent to corporate advertisers.
 
GEC’s determinations were a black box. All we know is that a host of federal agencies – from the CIA to the FBI, DHS, and the Pentagon – through GEC provided Twitter, Facebook, and Google with guidance on what content they should depost or hide. The requests were so frequent, The New York Post reports, social media companies developed systems to respond to these content moderation requests, often by complying.
 
The idea of a government agency secretly sanctioning U.S. journalism outlets on the basis of their coverage makes President Nixon’s “enemies list” seem benign by comparison. Beyond setting the First Amendment on fire, this effort also betrays the conceit that only a precious set of intelligence analysts can discern the truth. Thus, the GEC suppressed speakers who held that the COVID-19 virus had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, only to have the director of the FBI affirm in Congressional testimony that the bureau now believes that this was the likeliest cause of the pandemic.
 
Investigative journalists, foremost among them Matt Taibbi, reported many similar instances of the federal government’s efforts to censor news outlets.
 
Protect The 1st has no problem with an official effort to identify the propaganda of foreign terrorists and hostile regimes so long as officials are willing to make their case publicly. But secret efforts to kill U.S. publications, whether they are as careful and buttoned-down as Reason, as wide-ranging and balanced as RealClearPolitics, or unashamedly right-leaning as Newsmax, is not the business of our government. Protect The 1st would be just as alarmed if the State Department tried to shut down Mother Jones, the Nation, or the Daily Kos.
 
The Global Engagement Center was un-American in conception and operation. Nothing like this should be allowed to happen again.

One reason why Donald Trump won his second presidential term – against the expectations of notable mainstream commentators and respected pollsters – is that a small, independent group of influencers and online conservative news outlets went around the mainstream media to keep Americans informed of the candidate’s policy responses to the failures of the Biden Administration.
 
The 2024 election announced the arrival of the small, independent journalistic outfit, from Breitbart on the right to the streaming Young Turks show on the left. These independent voices have their slant on the news and their biases about candidates, but they have been effective in challenging the monolith of reporting from mainstream news organizations.
 
Protecting this ecosystem of independent, pluralistic voices is one reason why soon-to-be President Trump should support the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act.
 
Without reporters relying on whistleblowers, we might never have learned about many recent scandals, ranging from the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal under the Obama Administration to the IRS targeting of conservative non-profits under the direction of Lois Lerner, to the FBI’s highly politicized secret surveillance of Carter Page and the Trump campaign, to the truth behind the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. In each instance, brave whistleblowers came forward to set the record straight, often as sources for independent journalists.
 
“If you cannot offer a source a promise of confidentiality as a journalist, your toolbox is empty,” celebrated investigative journalist Catherine Herridge told members of a House Judiciary subcommittee. “No whistleblower is coming forward, no government official with evidence of misconduct or corruption. And what that means is that it interrupts the free flow of information to the public ...”
 
Herridge is currently fighting for her freedom in the face of a contempt charge regarding an investigative piece she did for Fox News concerning the possible penetration of U.S. higher education by Chinese intelligence. During the Obama administration, government lawyers also issued a search warrant for the emails of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Such aggressive legal tactics threaten to shut down the media’s ability to hold the federal government accountable.
 
It is for reasons like these that Republicans supported the PRESS Act, which this year passed the House with the sponsorship of Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) and the enthusiastic support of conservatives such as House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), as well as with the bipartisan support of many House Democrats. The PRESS Act also has the support of Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mike Lee (R-UT).
 
Catherine Herridge can rely on the generosity of Fox News for supporting her defense in facing down contempt charges. But few independent outlets have such deep pockets. A federal prosecutor seeking their sources would force a blogger or small outlet to immediately decide whether to rat out whistleblowers or spend every last dollar of their savings mounting a defense in court and still possibly go to prison.
 
President-elect Trump, supporting the PRESS Act in this Congress or the next would be a way for you to stand by the small, independent, online journalists and commentators who got your campaign appeals to the American people. To oppose the PRESS Act would be to score a goal for those who want to use this power to silence these voices. 

​You don’t have to be in the bag for one party or another to see that media outlets are taking on the partisan tone of newspapers reminiscent of the vitriol of the early American Republic. CNN and Fox News are at the far latitudes of different hemispheres and Newsmax and MSNBC are the North and South poles.
 
Roland Fryer, a Harvard University professor of economics, in Monday’s Wall Street Journal writes that the economic incentives of a fragmented media environment make it unlikely that we will see a return to objective journalism any time soon. “My hunch is that it will get worse before it gets better,” Fryer wrote. “I am skeptical that there is enough demand for objectivity and believe there are powerful economic forces pushing media outlets to give audiences the red meat they desire.”
 
All answers to this conundrum have so far failed. For example, some promote subsidized journalism as a way to ensure clear-eyed objectivity. But a close reading of subsidized ventures invariably reveals they skew to the left- or right-leaning predilections of their billionaire donors. We should remember that one reason early American newspapers were so biased is that they often received lucrative printing contracts when their favored political party won an election.
 
Out of frustration some hold up the heavy-handed speech codes of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union as a way forward. But, as we saw in the censorship of the Covid “lab-leak theory” – now held by the FBI as probably true – no one is smart enough to declare what is disinformation and what is mere information that belongs in the national debate.
 
Some look to President-elect Trump’s successful lawsuit against ABC for anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate statement that Donald Trump had been held “liable for rape by a jury.” ABC’s admission of error resulted in a $15 million settlement by the news organization to the Trump presidential library. This defamation case is cheered by some on the right as a sign that media bias can be addressed by aggressive application of libel law. This outcome certainly offers a new precedent that widens the boundaries of a public figure’s ability to win a defamation suit. Yet the statement in question was a limited misstatement of fact from a professional news organization, placing it arguably within the boundaries for public figures set by the U.S. Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan.
 
Most media bias, right or left, is not like that. Bias is less about how a story is reported, and more about which stories are selected. Thus CNN focuses on anonymous reports of Defense nominee Peter Hegseth’s alleged peccadillos, while Fox News focuses on heinous crimes committed by illegal aliens.
 
So if subsidized journalism, anti-“disinformation” campaigns by a consortium of government and media, and libel law will not guarantee objective journalism, what can we do?
 
We should begin by accepting there is no getting around the need to respect that the First Amendment gives media outlets the right to report in a biased fashion if they so choose. Even biased reporting fulfills the right of readers, watchers, and listeners to receive available reporting that aligns with their own biases. This is decidedly suboptimal. But if the alternative is to put some government functionary or faceless executive, or trial lawyer in charge of determining truth for everyone, we will be even worse off.
 
Fryer is right that media outlets pander to their audiences. The only way we’ve found to achieve balance is to skim The New York Times and Breitbart, CNN and Fox News, and then use our brains to read between the lines.

​Of all the things Americans expressed thanks for last Thursday, Protect The 1st is so grateful for the First Amendment that we adopted it as our namesake. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights is a simple guarantee of our constitutional right to speak freely, enshrined in our written constitution. It provides a bulwark against the encroaching tide of censorship that has eroded free expression in other countries.
 
The importance of a written guarantee of free speech is demonstrated in the alarming decline of free speech in Anglophone countries, long seen as bastions of liberty, that lack such a constitutional guarantee. Recent examples from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia underscore the importance of this uniquely American right.
​
The United Kingdom, the birthplace and champion of free speech, has increasingly succumbed to policing and punishing speech deemed offensive. Its 1986 Public Order Act made it a criminal offense to use “threatening, abusive, or insulting” words that might cause someone “harassment, alarm, or distress.” While the law’s language seems aimed at curbing harm, it effectively outlawed the mere act of offending someone. This led to absurd prosecutions, such as a man arrested for calling a police horse “gay” and a teenager detained for labeling Scientology a cult. These cases illustrate how the power to define “insult” can be wielded arbitrarily, stifling legitimate expression.
 
More recently, the UK has seen the rise of "non-crime hate incidents," where individuals are investigated for actions or speech perceived as offensive but not criminal. These incidents are recorded by the police and can affect individuals’ records, impacting their job prospects and social standing. For example, Essex Police investigated journalist Allison Pearson in 2024 over a year-old social media post allegedly inciting racial hatred. Although no charges were filed, the investigation drew backlash and raised concerns about the chilling effect of such probes on free expression.
 
Peaceful personal actions have also come under scrutiny. In 2024, Army veteran Adam Smith-Connor was convicted for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth. Despite the deeply personal nature of his prayer, he was ordered to pay significant prosecution costs. Similarly, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested in 2022 for silently praying near an abortion clinic in Birmingham, allegedly violating a local “buffer zone” order. Although she was later acquitted, her case sparked widespread concern over the criminalization of private thought and peaceful expression.
 
Canada, too, has seen troubling encroachments on free speech. The country’s human rights commissions have famously prosecuted individuals for “hate speech” under laws that are broad and subjective. One high-profile example involved comedian Mike Ward, who faced years of legal battles and was fined for making a joke about a disabled public figure. Such cases illustrate how speech, particularly humor (admittedly offensive) and dissenting opinions, can be punished when legal protections are weak or absent. The mere existence of these tribunals demonstrates a willingness to prioritize “dignity” over free expression, a choice that would be untenable under the First Amendment.

In Australia, free speech has also come under threat. In 2019, that country’s High Court upheld the dismissal of a public servant who criticized government policies anonymously on social media. The court ruled that such comments breached the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct, highlighting the limited protections for free speech, especially for government employees.
 
These examples from countries that share the common law tradition reveal a stark contrast. Britian gave us foundational texts like John Milton’s Areopagitica, a powerful argument for the liberty of unlicensed printing. Canada, with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, has nevertheless allowed subjective interpretations of “hate speech” to override open debate. Australia, lacking a constitutional free speech guarantee, has seen judicial decisions that limit public discourse. By comparison, the United States’ written Constitution, fortified by a judiciary that has generally stood firm in defense of free speech, has proven to be a fortress against these trends.
 
Americans benefit from a legal framework that assumes offensive speech is not a bug but a feature of free expression. The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld this principle, most notably in cases like Brandenburg v. Ohio, which protects even inflammatory speech unless it incites imminent lawless action. This robust protection enables a marketplace of ideas where good and bad arguments alike are subject to public scrutiny, not state suppression.
 
The comedian Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame has eloquently defended free speech, calling it “the most precious thing in life.” He warned that outlawing insult empowers orthodoxy to silence dissent and argued that “more speech” is the strongest weapon against hateful ideas. As we eat the last of our Thanksgiving leftovers, let us give thanks for the First Amendment, which guards the liberty to speak, argue, and dissent without fear. It is a fortress that protects us all.

​Award-winning journalist Catherine Herridge, who is being pressed by a federal judge to reveal her source for an investigative journalism series, has a lot on her plate.
 
She is walking the marbled halls of the U.S. Senate advocating passage of a bill, the PRESS Act, that would protect journalists and their sources. She is doing this while also facing the possibility of an $800 a day fine and jail time for not revealing the source behind her series of stories for Fox News in 2017.
 
Now Herridge is asking President-elect Trump to hear her out on why Senate passage of the PRESS Act is so important to independent, non-mainstream journalists who were so prominent in the last election. This new, rising sector of independent journalists, lacking the deep pockets of a newspaper or a network, are particularly vulnerable to government harassment. They are perhaps the most in need of a limited right to refuse demands from government prosecutors to reveal their sources. Here’s what Herridge told NewsNation:

​In the minds of many Americans, including some in high office, the First Amendment is synonymous only with free speech. It is easy to forget that freedom of speech is only one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First. The others are freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to petition the government… and freedom of the press.
 
Lawyer and legal scholar Floyd Abrams is consulting with historians, media lawyers, and journalists in a Yale Law School project to assess whether one of these freedoms – that of the press – has been protected to the extent that freedom of speech has been. Abrams reports in The Wall Street Journal on many issues we’ve covered, such as reporters being arrested for violating curfews to report on protests and civil unrest, and the exposure of confidential sources “who provide information about government misconduct or other sensitive information.”
 
In his piece, Abrams looks to the Supreme Court to bring the same force and clarity for press freedoms that it has brought to protecting speech overall. We agree and look forward to his forthcoming report. But there is another way forward.
 
This year, for the fourth time, with strong bipartisan support, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the PRESS Act, which shields the confidential sources and notes of reporters from the prying eyes of prosecutors. This bill allows for reasonable exceptions for emergencies. The PRESS Act is now before the U.S. Senate. With a little leadership from the Senate Judiciary Committee, it could be well on its way to becoming the law of the land before the end of the year.
 
So we don’t have to wait for the right cases to appear before the Supreme Court, at least as far as the protection of reporters’ confidential sources are concerned, we can contact our senators now and demand they pass the PRESS Act in the coming lame duck session.

​The nation’s two presidential candidates sometimes seem at a loss to understand or appreciate the First Amendment, which protects religious expression and freedom of the press, among other forms of speech.
 
Case in point: when Vice President Kamala Harris was asked this week in an NBC interview if she would support a religious exemption for physicians on abortion, she flatly rejected any such “concession.” The Democratic nominee for president spoke about the “basic freedom” of a woman to control her own body, while rejecting the idea that a physician in a white surgical gown should have control over the actions of his or her own hands.
 
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about – the Harris position would pull the medical licenses of men and women of faith for declining to personally perform abortions. Never mind that this country has no lack of physicians willing to perform that procedure.
 
Contrast the vice president’s stance with the Democrats of New Mexico, where last year Gov. Michelle Lujan and her fellow Democrats in the legislature took a commendable step to improve a law they championed to make sure it observes the religious freedom of physicians. That law is the Elizabeth Whitefield End-of-Life Options Act, which went into effect in 2021. The law required doctors who objected to administering fatal drugs to a patient to refer them to a physician who would. Gov. Lujan and her allies in the New Mexico legislature heard the outcry from physicians of faith and responded with courage to correct their law to observe the religious freedom of expression.
 
Why can’t Harris follow that example?
 
Then there is former President Trump, who has been littering the airwaves with threats to pull the broadcast licenses of ABC and then CBS for disputes over their fact checks and editorial decisions. News flash: Networks don’t have broadcast licenses. Their local affiliates do. News organizations don’t need a “license” to practice journalism. Anyone can do it. Again, it’s called the First Amendment.
 
Contrast the Republican nominee’s frequent threats with those of his Republican predecessors. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush complained about media bias, but each of them found artful ways to counter it. The first President Bush forcefully rejected the contentions of CBS’s Dan Rather on air, then the allies of the second President Bush discredited him so badly that Rather eventually resigned from CBS. The presidential father and son did so by exercising their First Amendment rights, without resorting to threats of censorship.
 
Yet listening to our candidates today, we have to ask: is rubbishing the First Amendment the new normal in American presidential politics? At the very least, the current state of the presidential debate points to the urgency of restoring civics education that imparts a classical understanding of our Constitution.