The First Amendment Doesn’t Need Verified Credentials

In Newark, police in riot gear decide who counts as a journalist

​Amid the recent protests at Newark’s Delaney Hall ICE detention facility, numerous reporters came to document a hunger strike by detainees over conditions inside. As Adam Rose writes in his essay for The Guardian, it was a bad day in a bad week for the First Amendment. To wit:

• An officer declared, “If you are press, you got the opportunity right now – and that’s it – to leave. If you don’t leave out here in an orderly fashion, you are coming with us.”

• He then pointed at someone in the crowd, which was composed mostly of journalists, and declared: "You are not press.”

• The previous Friday, police ordered WNBC reporters out of their vehicle and into a cloud of tear gas that had been deployed against protesters.

• Multiple photojournalists have been injured by police while trying to cover the protests.

It seems that the individual the officer declared by fiat to be a non-journalist was a livestreamer, one of many people at the scene who are playing an increasingly important role in modern journalism. This is especially true as the news divisions of local television stations cut their budgets and reduce news coverage.

Police were apparently unhappy because despite their obvious efforts to block access to traditional crews and cameras, the independents were prevailing. Rose points out that there were five live video feeds near the Delaney Hall protests a few nights earlier and that “none came from traditional TV cameras.”

Multiple livestreaming journalists have been arrested at Delaney Hall. One was injured and taken to a hospital. Three others were held in custody for a day and denied access to counsel. One was handcuffed despite having an ID badge around his neck and a blue vest with “PRESS” emblazoned on it. “Like the injured journalist,” noted Rose, “he was a member of the National Press Photographers Association.” They were all told their credentials hadn’t been “verified,” which is authoritarian-speak for “nothing to see here.”

But there was, as it turns out, quite a bit to see – and film. The injured livestreamer saw two arrested protesters when he was at the hospital, but in the absence of independent cameras, how they came by their injuries – or when – was impossible to determine. Was it during the initial clash with police, or while they were being detained?

The Founders didn’t have video, but they would have understood that the surest way to keep the public from learning how people are treated is to make sure nobody is making a record.
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A free press isn’t free if it requires the state’s permission to operate. That thoroughly authoritarian impulse was the very one the framers of the First Amendment most wanted to rein in.

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