Outside Poynter’s front door, etched in stone, sits the First Amendment. When it rains here, and it often rains here, one of my colleagues pulls out tiny orange cones and places them around the etching. That stone, it turns out, gets kinda slippery.
Regardless of the weather where you are, thanks to increasing hostility from the federal government toward the free press, now might be a good time to pull out some orange caution cones of your own. Those cones shouldn’t slow you or your work down, but instead remind you to pay attention to the spots where care is required when conditions aren’t good.
On Monday, Poynter hosted a webinar on safeguarding your journalism against legal threats with David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel at The New York Times and Victoria Baranetsky, general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Poynter’s Angela Fu wrote this piece about that conversation and their recommendations. I’ve pulled out a few takeaways.
“I actually think that the law has been and will continue to be resilient,” McCraw said on Monday. “I think where you’ll really see the pressure ground level for journalists is on access and on the protection of sources.”
And so…
Fu writes “an unflattering private message to a colleague, for example, could be unearthed in court — as was the case earlier this year when a jury found CNN guilty of defaming a security contractor.”
“That includes communications platforms like Gmail and Slack, as well as transcription services like Otter,” Fu reported. “Newsrooms should understand those platforms’ document retention policies and how they would respond to a subpoena.”
“Customs and Border Protection agents have the authority to search electronic devices, so journalists may decide to take measures like turning off their phone when crossing the border or ensuring that the laptop they carry is ‘clean.’”
“The extent of that privilege varies by state, but states that have it generally allow journalists to avoid being held liable for defamation when they report on official public documents like lawsuits,” Fu wrote. “‘Relying on documents is really useful in this administration,’ Baranetsky said. ‘It’s very hard to bring a case when you say, ‘This is what’s on the piece of paper, and I’m just reporting that.’”
“Since 1964, the law in this country as enunciated by the Supreme Court has really been a message to journalists to take chances, to be aggressive, to hold power accountable,” McCraw said. “And if your lawyers are causing you to be scared, they are betraying that legacy.”
Here’s the full story.
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