Freedom of the Press

We were pleasantly surprised when congressional Republicans introduced our farewell article to the former president, titled Biden’s press freedom legacy: Empty words and hypocrisy, into the record at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week.

That’s great — it’s always nice to have our work recognized. But if Republican lawmakers agree with us that former President Joe Biden was bad on press freedom, someone should really tell them about this Donald Trump character who’s in office now. All the abuses we identified in the article Republicans cited have (as the article predicted) worsened under the new president, and he’s come up with plenty of new ones too.

We wrote a letter to let the committee know that if it’s serious about addressing the issues our article discussed, regardless of who is in the White House, we’re here to help. We’ll let you know if they reply (but don’t hold your breath). Read the letter here or below.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

For 164 days, Rümeysa Öztürk has faced deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and for 83 days, Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.

Recording police is not ‘violence’

It was bad enough when government officials claimed that journalists are inciting violence by reporting. But now, they’re accusing reporters of actually committing violence.

The supposed violence by reporters? Recording videos. At least three times recently, a government official or lawyer has argued that simply recording law enforcement or Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is a form of violence. Read more here.

Thanks for citing us, House Republicans. Now do something

Congressional Republicans introduced our farewell article to the former president, titled Biden’s press freedom legacy: Empty words and hypocrisy, into the record at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week.

That’s great — it’s always nice to have our work recognized. But if these lawmakers agree with us that former President Joe Biden was bad on press freedom, someone should really tell them about this Donald Trump character who’s in office now. All the abuses we identified in the article Republicans cited have (as the article predicted) worsened under the new president, and he’s come up with plenty of new ones too.

We wrote a letter to let the committee know that if it’s serious about addressing the issues our article discussed, regardless of who is in office, we’re here to help. We’ll let you know if they reply (but don’t hold your breath). Read the letter here.

Will secret law prevail in drug boat massacre?

The Trump administration has not provided any legal justification for blowing up a boat carrying 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers on the Caribbean Sea. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out if lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel were consulted before the slaughter and, if so, what they said.

If there is an OLC opinion about the targeting of the Venezuelan boat, the public and Congress should be able to debate it right now. Unfortunately, the government has long taken the position that OLC opinions should be secret, even though there should be no such thing as secret law in the United States. Read more here, and, if you want to learn more about government secrecy and what we’re doing to combat it, subscribe to The Classifieds.

Stop the judicial secrecy bill

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would allow lawmakers to scrub information about themselves from the internet. The bill fails to achieve its stated purpose of keeping lawmakers safe — except from investigative journalism.

This week we helped lead a letter to senators from press freedom and civil liberties organizations objecting to the misguided legislation. Even if the NDAA amendment does not succeed, it’s likely that this bill will be back, and we’ll be ready to fight it. Read the letter here.

ICE revives contract for spyware

In 2023, Biden issued an executive order limiting government use of commercial spyware. Subsequently, the Biden administration issued a stop-work order on a $2 million contract between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Paragon, a spyware vendor that makes products that have reportedly been used to spy on journalists.

It now appears ICE is reinstating this contract. Read more here and subscribe to our Digital Security Tips newsletter.

Trump’s anti-press rhetoric is “not bluster; it is not a personality trait. It is deliberate,” our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker’s Stephanie Sugars said. “It is very much at the cost of the strength of our social fabric and our shared reality.”

Great work by our friends at Reporters Without Borders organizing this response to Israel’s slaughter of journalists in Gaza. It’s unfortunate that more U.S. outlets did not participate. If the outlets you support were not among the few, ask them why.

We spoke to The Dissenter about the Illinois Supreme Court’s ridiculous ruling that the state’s law against strategic lawsuits against public participation doesn’t protect reporting, and the recently passed bill to repair the damage.

We talked to the Times about influencers replacing journalists at the White House. Yes, it’s awful that Trump won’t grant reporters the honor of getting lied to at press briefings. But the decimation of FOIA — a source of facts, not spin — is even more concerning.

Kristi Noem’s complaints underscore why news outlets can’t settle frivolous lawsuits. Now, the door is wide open for government officials to question every editing decision news outlets make, whether to shorten an interview for time or to not air lies and nonsense.

When rules restrict police body cameras from being used to provide transparency, the only use left for them is surveillance.

A good recap of why “originalist” attacks on the actual malice standard — which limits defamation claims by public figures — are so disingenuous.

It was bad enough when government officials claimed that journalists incite violence by reporting. But now, they’re accusing reporters of actually committing violence.

The supposed violence by reporters? Recording videos. At least three times recently, a government official or lawyer has argued that simply recording law enforcement or Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is a form of violence.

In July, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proclaimed during a news conference following ICE raids on California farms that videotaping ICE agents performing operations is “violence.” Noem lumped video recordings in with other forms of actual violence, like throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails at agents.

Then, in August, Justice Department lawyer Sean Skedzielewski argued, during a court hearing over the Los Angeles Police Department’s mistreatment of journalists covering protests, that videotaping law enforcement officers “can be used for violence.” He claimed recording is violent because it can reveal officers’ identities, leading to harassment, and can encourage more protesters to join the fray.

Also in August, the government applied similar logic as it fought against the release of Mario Guevara, the only journalist in U.S. custody after being arrested for newsgathering. Guevara, who is originally from El Salvador, was detained while covering a protest in Georgia and turned over to ICE for deportation. In a bond hearing before an immigration court in July, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the government argued that Guevara’s recording and livestreaming of law enforcement “presents a safety threat.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, videotaping someone is not the equivalent of throwing a firebomb at them. Actually, recordings of law enforcement officers made by journalists and members of the public allow the public to see what the police are up to and hold officers accountable for abusing their authority or breaking the law.

That includes holding officers who are violating the First Amendment accountable in court. Adam Rose, chair of the press rights committee for the LA Press Club, said that Skedzielewski also denied in court that DHS officers had pointed weapons at journalists, despite video evidence submitted to the court of them doing exactly that.

Skedzielewski “wound up making our case for us,” Rose told us. “His own argument showed how the government can try to lie in court, and why filming in public is critical to ensure the truth comes out.”

Video recording police in public is also protected by the First Amendment, as both Rose and Mickey Osterreicher, the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, point out. “The claim that journalists and others video recording police are engaged in ‘acts of violence’ is not only absurd on its face but flies in the face of the law and common sense,” said Osterreicher.

That constitutional right applies even if officers would prefer not to be identified. The government often claims that officers must not be identified because they’re at risk of (real) violence or harassment. But the correct response to those threats is to prosecute and punish those who actually break the law by harassing or physically attacking police, not make up crimes to go after those who exercise their First Amendment right to record them.

The government claims at other times that officers should not be recorded because they’re undercover. The government has been known to abuse this argument, including by making bizarre claims that any officer who may, at some point, go undercover should be treated as undercover at all times. Plus, journalists have no way of knowing whether a particular agent participating in an immigration raid or officer policing a protest is undercover at the moment they’re recording. The responsibility of preserving officers’ cover is on the officer and the government, not journalists and the public who can observe them working in plain view.

These justifications, however, are mere pretext for the government’s true purpose. Officials want courts and the public to believe that recording agents and officers is a violent act because it justifies officers’ own violent response to the press.

In LA, government attorney Skedzielewski didn’t just argue that video recording is violent. He said that meant that justified officers in using force against people videotaping them. This claim—made in a court that’s already restrained police from attacking journalists after they were documented violently assaulting and detaining reporters repeatedly —should seriously alarm journalists and anyone who wants to record police.

“For an officer of the court to conflate the use of recordings to reveal police officers’ identities with the actual making of those recordings, in order to justify the use of excessive force against those doing the recording, shows complete ignorance of the law, disregard for the Constitution, a blatant attempt to demonize those who would dare risk their health and safety to provide visual proof of police behavior, or all three,” said Osterreicher.

That demonization is working, unfortunately, especially when it comes to ICE officers’ beliefs about how they can respond to being recorded. In recent months, ICE officers have knocked phones out of the hands of those recording them, pulled weapons on people photographing or videotaping them, and even arrested U.S. citizens for filming them.

The escalating attacks on journalists and citizens who are recording police show the danger of the government’s rhetoric. All who care about press freedom and transparency must push back on claims equating filming to violence.

When officials say at news conferences that video recording is violent, journalists should challenge that assertion and cite the law.

When attorneys argue that recording police justifies violence or arrest, they should have their arguments confronted by opposing counsel and the judge, who has the power to sanction lawyers who ignore First Amendment jurisprudence to make frivolous arguments on behalf of the government.

And when ICE officers harass or detain someone for videotaping them, everyone else should take out their phones and hit the record button.

Recording the police isn’t violence. Don’t let officials get away with loud, incorrect claims to the contrary to diminish our First Amendment rights.

A couple of years ago, a judge in Arizona issued a restraining order against journalist Camryn Sanchez at the behest of a state senator, Wendy Rogers. The ordeal was alarming, but press freedom advocates were able to breathe a sigh of relief when the order was struck down by another judge a few weeks later. That Rogers is, well, out of her mind, made it easier to hope that the whole thing was an isolated incident.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. A Maryland journalist, Will Fries, was recently served with a “peace order” that would’ve barred him from city hall in Salisbury. The order, requested by the city’s communications director (allegedly in coordination with higher-ups), followed Fries’ reporting on the city’s purported policy requiring media inquiries to be routed through its communications office — which officials cited to restrict Fries from asking questions during a committee meeting.

Fortunately, a judge ultimately declined to issue the order. But after the Arizona restraining order and plenty of other instances of local officials claiming bizarre grounds to punish routine newsgathering, it would be a mistake to dismiss Fries’ case as a one-off.

We talked to Fries about the experience via email. Our conversation is below.

Tell us briefly about your background and the kind of reporting you do for The Watershed Observer.

For over a decade, I’ve worked to counter disinformation and malign influence across communities. I’ve done investigative work for nonprofits and tech companies, served on major presidential campaigns, and overseen digital strategy for former Portland (Oregon) Mayor Ted Wheeler (where things got interesting). Most recently, I launched The Watershed Observer to provide communities with faithful reporting at the intersection of local and global issues.

We want to talk about the “peace order,” or restraining order, that a government employee sought against you in Salisbury, but it looks like there’s a bit of press freedom “Inception” going on — that ordeal arose from your reporting on another press freedom issue. What happened on August 6 in Salisbury, Maryland?

Salisbury’s Mayor’s Office claimed the Human Rights Advisory Committee advised him to remove a rainbow crosswalk. In reality, the committee had voted against that and gone on public record disputing the mayor’s communications. I received reports, tips, and outreach, and I reviewed the committee’s approved May meeting minutes.

As a courtesy, I let the committee know ahead of time that I planned to take part in the open, public forum section of their August 6 meeting. After being recognized, when I raised questions about the mayor’s false statement, the mayor’s liaison blocked both me and the committee from discussion, falsely claiming a city policy barred journalists from participating. No such policy exists. Later, the mayor’s comms director sent an email exclusively targeting the Human Rights Committee and their ability to speak with the press and public about their public work, the same group that had raised concerns about the mayor’s misinformation.

The kind of policy that the mayoral staffer cited, that city employees are required to route all media inquiries to a communications office, has been referred to as “censorship by PIO,” or public information officer, because of how it limits the information obtainable by journalists. They’ve repeatedly been held unconstitutional. Putting aside that the commission members weren’t actually city employees subject to the policy — and that even if a city policy could restrict employees from answering certain questions, it certainly can’t block reporters from asking them — how have you observed these policies impacting the press?

The city’s actions had a tangible chilling effect. After the comms director’s email, some committee members hesitated to go on record, while others only spoke confidentially. In practice, this limited the committee’s ability to speak publicly about human rights issues or potential concerns regarding the mayor and his staff.

“If someone is a nongovernment actor who produces media to be consumed by the public, they are press. The idea of official versus unofficial press is a ridiculous invention.”

I say actions, not policy, because there is no legitimate city policy banning journalists from participating in public meetings, and such a rule would serve no legitimate purpose. The false claim and creation of policy was fabricated in the moment to intimidate and coerce members of the public body, and me, in order to suppress participation in further discussing the mayor’s office’s gross misrepresentation of the committee’s public work. Its only purpose was to block accountability and prevent scrutiny.

I noticed in some correspondence, the comms director seems to refer to you as someone who claims to be a member of the media, and distinguishes between what she sees as official and unofficial press. As an independent journalist, how do you think city officials should determine who is or isn’t really the press? Or should they at all?

If someone is a nongovernment actor who produces media to be consumed by the public, they are press. The idea of “official” versus “unofficial” press is a ridiculous invention, completely at odds with constitutional protections and civic norms. The city of Salisbury has no legitimate policy distinguishing “real” from “not real” press, nor could it. That notion exists only to imply the city can ignore questions or accountability from anyone they don’t consider “official press.” They can’t. In Maryland, our Declaration of Rights explicitly extends the freedom of the press to “every citizen,” and many states have similar protections.

Talk about the follow-up reporting you did, or tried to do, after the August 6 meeting.

After the August 6 meeting, I did what any responsible journalist would do: I followed up. I gave the city employee a chance to clarify. I reached out to the mayor’s comms director for confirmation and comment. I also shared my reporting with the committee, inviting them to add their perspectives. Instead of engaging, the comms director issued an email exclusively to the Human Rights Advisory Committee, discouraging members from speaking to the press or the public. They spread falsehoods about me and my reporting in retaliation, rather than investigate the reality themselves or address the underlying facts of the mayor’s misinformation about the Human Rights Committee and mayor’s staff improperly interfering at the August 6 meeting. I also filed public records requests to learn more about the city’s processes and policies.

Then you got the peace order from the mayor’s comms director. Which allegations in the peace order application do you contend were factually false, and did the city ever present any evidence that those allegations were, in fact, true?

The comms director falsely claimed I was behind a nonthreatening and fact-forward whistleblower email that raised serious ethical concerns about her conduct, and petitioned that this, combined with my public records requests, somehow were grounds for a peace order. Those allegations were unfounded, baseless, and unsupported by any evidence. The petition functioned solely as retaliation against protected activities and now fits into an observable pattern of the city disregarding realities.

I’ve had a long investigatory career, and I am aware of other instances where peace orders have been misused as tools to discredit reporters and witnesses, or to intimidate people participating in serious investigations. At the same time, it’s important for everyone to recognize that lawful peace orders serve an important and serious purpose: They protect individuals from genuine threats and ensure safety in difficult circumstances. I believe that misuse and abuse of peace orders is rare.

So stripping away the allegations you dispute, what’s left is essentially that you sought comment for stories from the comms director, filed public records requests, and voiced your displeasure with how officials had characterized your reporting. That all sounds like routine journalistic conduct (especially when city policy doesn’t allow you to talk to anyone else besides the comms director) and a pretty open-and-shut case. Was it easy to get this thrown out?

Once all false statements and disprovable allegations are removed, what remains is professional conduct and routine journalism: seeking comment, filing records requests, and following up on city actions, activities documented by journalists every day. It’s concerning that it went as far as a court proceeding, but the judge ultimately ruled there was no basis for the petition.

Do you think higher-ups at the city had anything to do with the effort to obtain a peace order against you, which, incidentally, would have restricted you from entering city headquarters?

During sworn testimony, the mayor’s comms director acknowledged she pursued the peace order with encouragement and guidance from the city solicitor’s office and the Police Department. If that testimony were false, it would amount to perjury. In addition, I have received reports from trusted sources that an elected official may have personally participated. All of this indicates the effort wasn’t an isolated action by one employee, but part of a broader institutional attempt to retaliate against a reporter and restrict reporting access.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), only has one case documented in which a judge knowingly entered a restraining order against a journalist (the Tracker is not documenting your case because the court declined to issue the order). That case involved a state senator in Arizona who objected to a reporter knocking on her door, and the order was later overturned. But there have been plenty of cases involving reporters being arrested, ticketed, investigated, sued, raided, or criminally charged over routine journalism. How do you think what happened to you fits into this broader national trend of local authorities retaliating against the press for doing its job?

We are seeing instances in which some people with public responsibilities respond to journalists with resistance or retaliation rather than openness. These actions rarely arise from legitimate concern and more often reflect institutional reluctance to confront reality or uphold accountability. In some cases, public officials entrusted with serving their communities treat engagement and transparency as risks rather than obligations. The healthiest communities are built on leaders who stay open, accountable, and ready to face tough questions from the public and the press.

Everyone has a responsibility to support press freedom, including journalists, city employees, and members of the public. Sometimes that responsibility is as simple as subscribing to a news outlet. Other times, it involves asking hard questions and sharing difficult truths with the public. And in some cases, it requires taking personal risks, including facing arrest or accusations, to advance public interests.

In this climate, we all have a responsibility to ask ourselves the hard questions about what we each can do to strengthen a free and transparent society.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

For 157 days, Rümeysa Öztürk has faced deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and for 76 days, Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.

Government excuses for Öztürk secrecy are insulting

A recent court filing suggests the U.S. government is abusing the Freedom of Information Act to hide potentially damning evidence about its March arrest of Öztürk over her co-authorship of an op-ed criticizing Israel.

The government told Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), in response to a lawsuit we’ve filed for Öztürk’s records, that releasing them would be an invasion of privacy, although it’s not clear whose. Read more here. And to learn more about our FOIA work, subscribe to our secrecy newsletter, The Classifieds.

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Stop congressional secrecy bill

A new legislative proposal – almost identical to one we opposed in 2023 – would allow members and even former members of Congress to compel the censorship of a broad range of information that journalists and others are constitutionally entitled to publish.

It would impede journalists’ and watchdogs’ efforts to, for example, check property, vehicle or travel records to investigate bribery allegations, monitor lawmakers leaving their districts during emergencies, scrutinize potential financial conflicts impacting policy positions, and a myriad of other newsworthy matters. We collaborated with our friends at Defending Rights & Dissent on a petition to lawmakers to stop this censorial proposal. Contact your senator here.

Police: Don’t impersonate journalists

We told you last week that police in Eugene, Oregon, said they’d stop putting their videographers in “PRESS” vests. Great.

But the practice was disturbing enough that we thought police in Eugene and elsewhere needed to understand the dangers of government employees posing as journalists — from providing propagandists with greater access than real journalists to exposing journalists and police officers alike to the risk of assault.

We led a letter from press and liberties groups to Eugene’s police chief, copying national associations of police communications personnel.Read it here.

Another journalist restraining order

A couple years ago, a judge in Arizona issued a restraining order against journalist Camryn Sanchez at the behest of a state senator, Wendy Rogers. That ordeal was alarming, but press freedom advocates were able to breathe a sigh of relief when the order was struck down by another judge a few weeks later. That Rogers is, well, out of her mind, made it easier to hope that the whole thing was an isolated incident.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Maryland journalist Will Fries was recently served with a “peace order” that would’ve barred him from city hall in Salisbury. Fortunately, a judge ultimately declined to issue the order, but after the Arizona restraining order and plenty of other instances of local officials claiming bizarre grounds to punish routine newsgathering, it would be a mistake to dismiss Fries’ case as a one-off.

We talked to Fries about the experience via email. Read the conversation here.

What we’re reading

Israel’s killing of six Gaza journalists draws global condemnation (Al Jazeera). We told Al Jazeera that “Any story that quotes an Israeli official or references Israeli allegations should say that Israel does not allow the international press to verify its claims and kills the local journalists who try.”

Homeland Security tells watchdog it hasn’t kept text message data since April (The New York Times). We told the Times that “Agencies cannot get away from responding to FOIA requests by intentionally degrading their capabilities … This is like a fire department saying, ‘We don’t have a hose, so we’re not going to put out the fires anymore.’”

Accepted at universities, unable to get visas: inside Trump’s war on international students (The Intercept). “An intrepid reporter who wants to use his time in America to become an even more effective watchdog against government corruption is an undesirable in the eyes of a corrupt government like ours,” we told The Intercept about journalist Kaushik Raj’s student visa denial.

News groups ask judge to increase protections for journalists covering LA protests (Courthouse News). The federal government apparently believes that assaulting journalists covering protests is legal because “videotaping can lead to violence.” The First Amendment says otherwise.

The student newspaper suing Marco Rubio over targeted deportations (The Intercept). “It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Conor Fitzpatrick of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Intercept.

Lack of local news tied to government secrecy, new report says (Medill Local News Initiative). A new study by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment shows that states with more newspapers are more likely to respond to records requests, and states with fewer papers are more likely to ignore them.

Public broadcast cuts hit rural areas, revealing a political shift (The New York Times). Rural stations in Alaska and elsewhere may no longer have the bandwidth to send emergency alerts. That could be the difference between life and death.

Opinion: D.C. must invest in local news (The 51st). Funding local news by directing public grants through consumer coupons is a creative way to address the local news crisis. Local governments must act to keep community news from dying.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

For 150 days, Rümeysa Öztürk has faced deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and for 69 days, Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.

​​New strategies to help journalists in Gaza

Letters and condemnations have their place in press freedom advocacy, especially when dealing with a persuadable audience. But that playbook isn’t working for journalists in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his arms supplier, President Donald Trump, don’t care about journalists’ lives, let alone their freedoms.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) board member and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Azmat Khan and her colleagues, Meghnad Bose and Lauren Watson, spoke to over 20 journalists and activists, including FPF Executive Director Trevor Timm, in search of novel ideas to stop Israel’s slaughter of journalists and concealment of war crimes. Read more in Columbia Journalism Review.

FPF complaint opposes U.S. attorney’s retaliation against press

It’d be journalistic malpractice for reporters to ignore a prominent public official listing a boarded-up house as his residence to claim eligibility for his position. But that’s not how John Sarcone III, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, sees it.

He was reportedly “incensed” by reporting from the Times Union of Albany and ordered the paper removed from his office’s media list. In response, FPF, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Reinvent Albany filed a complaint with New York’s Attorney Grievance Committee. Read more here.

Oregon cops cosplay as journalists

Eugene police threatened documentary filmmaker Tim Lewis with arrest if he didn’t back up while filming them. But Lewis noticed another reporter wearing a vest marked “PRESS” filming without police harassment.

Turns out he wasn’t a reporter at all — he was a police public information program coordinator. As FPF Advocacy Director Seth Stern told Double Sided Media, “Police officers obstructing lawful journalism and giving their own publicly funded propagandists the exclusive right to record them up close is unconstitutional, un-American, and absurd.”

Eugene police have reportedly said they will replace the word “press” with “videographer.” Read more here.

Kansas school district fails to censor student journalists

A group of students sued Lawrence Public Schools in Kansas over the district’s use of surveillance software against students, including student journalists. Naturally, the student newspaper wanted to report on the case. But the principal ordered them not to, and the students believed their faculty adviser would be fired if they disobeyed.

Major news conglomerates have caved to official pressure, but not these kids. They sought a court order prohibiting the school from censoring them, leading the principal to drop his censorial directive and a judge to remind the district that the adviser was legally protected from retaliation. Then they published their story. Read it here.

Puerto Rico’s fake news law is unconstitutional

A district court rightly struck down Puerto Rico’s “fake news” law, which criminalized raising “false alarms” about public emergencies. Now, FPF and other rights organizations are urging an appellate court to affirm the ruling in a legal brief authored by the University of Georgia School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic.

The brief explained how the law could be selectively enforced to chill reporting that officials dislike. Read more here.

What we’re reading

Pritzker signs bill to protect freedom of press, Illinois journalists (WCIA). A nonsensical court ruling excluded news reporting from the protection of Illinois’ law against strategic lawsuits against public participation. FPF worked with local organizations and lawyers to help fix the mess.

Human rights groups to university administrators: Dismantle surveillance to defend free speech now (Fight for the Future). Surveillance technology has no place on college campuses and especially in student newsrooms. We joined a letter calling on universities to dismantle these dangerous tools.

Lawyers ask judge to order ICE to free Spanish-language journalist from immigration detention (The Associated Press). Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s targeting of Mario Guevara — a lawful U.S. resident — based on his journalism is a flagrant First Amendment violation. He must be released.

US: Excessive force against LA protesters (Human Rights Watch). HRW usually focuses on wars and atrocities. Now, they’re investigating LA cops’ violence against protesters and journalists. It’s not because it’s a slow atrocity news week — it’s because the situation in LA really is that bad.

Israel says it killed a Hamas commander. It killed a Pulitzer-winning journalist (The New York Times). “The military made no attempt to obscure this brazen strike on civilians, which is a war crime.” And as +972 Magazine explained, it’s far from the first time Israel smeared journalists as terrorists to justify killing them. Its army has a unit tasked with linking journalists to Hamas.

Watchdog or ‘witch hunt’? Highland releases final review of town clerk’s office (River Reporter). Good for the upper Delaware region’s River Reporter for not letting an embattled town supervisor’s veiled threat of a SLAPP stop it from doing its job.

Journalists planning to cover McCormick, Perry event in Pennsylvania must prove their US citizenship (Penn Live). “Journalists who are citizens should decline to attend if their peers are excluded. They should spend their Tuesday investigating politicians and arms manufacturers rather than covering their photo ops,” Stern said.

For the Record is MuckRock’s weekly newsletter that keeps you informed on public records transparency battles, threats and wins. Sign-up to get original reporting, access to FOIA trainings and more.

Any serious journalist would tell you that it’d be journalistic malpractice for a local journalist not to report that a prominent public official listed a boarded-up house as his official residence in order to claim eligibility for his position. But that’s not how John Sarcone III, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, sees it.

He was reportedly “incensed” by reporting from the Times Union of Albany and ordered his subordinates to remove it from his office’s media list. In response, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), Demand Progress Education Fund, and Reinvent Albany have filed a complaint against Sarcone with New York’s Attorney Grievance Committee.

As the complaint explains, “Sarcone is the chief legal officer charged with enforcing federal law in a district that covers over 30,000 square miles and is home to 3.4 million people. And yet he either does not know or does not care about the ‘practically universal agreement that a major purpose of [the First] Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs.’”

The complaint requests that the Committee open an investigation to determine whether Sarcone's conduct violates New York’s Rules of Professional Conduct, and exercise its power to impose sanctions, which can include disbarment.

FPF’s Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said: “All licensed attorneys — but especially top prosecutors entrusted to protect the public, not just their clients — should know better than to retaliate against newspapers for basic public-interest journalism. Sarcone has repeatedly abused his office in his brief tenure. The committee should ensure he can no longer undermine the Constitution and embarrass the legal profession.”

Demand Progress Education Fund Special Advisor Kate Oh stated: “A prosecutor who so flagrantly disregards his ethical and professional obligations and tramples over the First Amendment rights of the press should not be empowered to enforce the laws of our nation. Sarcone’s professional history is littered with red flags and must be investigated. No less than the public’s faith in the rule of law is at stake.”

Reinvent Albany Executive Director John Kaehny said: “With great power comes great responsibility, and U.S. Attorneys like John Sarcone are among the most powerful people in America. Unfortunately, Mr. Sarcone has grossly abused his authority and betrayed the public trust. Mr. Sarcone's flagrant misuse of his authority to retaliate against the Albany Times-Union and his repeated, well-documented dishonesty are completely unacceptable, unethical, and violate basic democratic norms and rules of professional conduct. The Times Union is one of the most respected newspapers and civic institutions in New York, and it's chilling to see it attacked by an unethical U.S. Attorney with a personal grievance.”

You can read the complaint here or below. If you’d like further comment, please contact media@freedom.press or eric@demandprogress.org ,or info@reinventalbany.org.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s the 143rd day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 62nd day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. After more than two months in detention, press freedom groups are again demanding Guevara’s immediate release. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.

LAPD lies about attack on reporters

Last Friday, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department wantonly violated a court order by assaulting, detaining, and jailing journalists covering a protest.

Then, the LAPD falsely told California station KABC-TV that two people were detained at the protest for “pretending to be media.” The two were, in fact, journalists, but you wouldn’t know it from KABC-TV’s report, which uncritically parroted the LAPD’s claims.

Journalists must be skeptical of LAPD statements about its treatment of the press. The department knows that it violates the First Amendment and California law to detain or interfere with journalists covering protests, but it does it anyway. It won’t stop until the press reports accurately on all of the LAPD’s abuses, and the public makes clear that it won’t stand for them.

Read more here.

Israel kills journalists in Gaza to silence reporting

Two weeks ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on the Israeli Defense Forces’ threats to Anas al-Sharif, meant to scare him into ceasing reporting. He didn’t, and now he’s dead.

Al-Sharif was one of four Al Jazeera staff correspondents and two freelancers killed by the IDF in an Aug. 10 targeted strike. The others were Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammad al-Khaldi.

“Israel is killing journalists for exposing its atrocities in Gaza,” said Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) director of advocacy Seth Stern. “We can’t let our leaders get away with mere performative condemnations while the money and weapons Israel uses to exterminate journalists and other civilians keep flowing.”

Read the full statement here.

Two years since ‘a massive failure’ of the justice system in Kansas

This week marked two years since the shocking police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of Record co-owner Joan Meyer, who passed away the day after the raid.

FPF spoke to investigative journalist Jessica McMaster, whose award-winning coverage of the raid for KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Missouri, had us glued to her social media feed for weeks.

“This was a massive failure by several people within the justice system,” McMaster said, speaking about the raid. “I think it’s hard for a lot of us to grasp that so many people, in positions of power, failed in such spectacular fashion to do their jobs.”

Read the full interview here.

How a climate change researcher makes FOIA work

Rachel Santarsiero, director of the Climate Change Transparency Project at the National Security Archive, knows how to use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover information the government would rather keep secret. This week, FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper spoke to Santarsiero, who shared her expert FOIA tips.

“The key with any agency is sending targeted requests asking for specific types of documents, a date range, and the office or official who would’ve been responsible for the records,” Santarsiero explained.

Santarsiero also recommends that requesters build relationships with FOIA officers, always appeal denials, and check federal website reading rooms and other publicly available source materials. “You’ll be surprised what you can find hiding in plain sight,” she said.

Read the whole interview here.

What we’re reading

Eyewitness to Gaza’s death traps: Whistleblower Anthony Aguilar in conversation with Defending Rights & Dissent (Defending Rights & Dissent). With journalists being killed or shut out in Gaza, whistleblowers are even more important. Watch Anthony Aguilar’s firsthand account of blowing the whistle on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Trump administration outlines plan to throw out an agency’s FOIA requests en masse (404Media). This is “an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly?” FPF’s Harper said.

Appeals court upholds block on Indiana’s 25-foot police buffer law, citing vagueness (Indiana Capital Chronicle). Hopefully, Tennessee’s and Louisiana’s “buffer” laws will be next, and other states will think twice before passing these unconstitutional laws.

Sorry, scanner listeners: BPD is encrypting its transmissions starting this weekend (Boston.com). Just like in New York City, encrypting police radio transmissions and adding a delay makes it harder for journalists to report and the public to stay informed.

Last Friday, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department beat, shoved, detained, and jailed journalists covering a protest over the previous detention of a community activist who had been documenting immigration officers.

It was a brutal and shocking attack on the press, even by the LAPD’s standards. Even before scores of journalists were attacked and detained at recent immigration raid protests, the force had one of the most atrocious track records when it comes to press freedom.

The LAPD is also subject to a court order prohibiting it from interfering with journalists covering protests, which it appears to have wantonly violated. The Los Angeles Press Club, which sued the LAPD over its recent treatment of journalists at protests, has asked the court to hold the LAPD in contempt for violating its order and impose new restrictions.

What’s almost as shocking is how little attention these recent attacks have drawn from the mainstream media. Even five days later, the hometown Los Angeles Times, for instance, hadn’t yet written about Friday’s attack on the press. Thankfully, an out-of-town columnist, Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, published an article strongly condemning the LAPD’s actions.

But even worse than ignoring the attacks on the press is reporting false information about them spread by the LAPD. Unfortunately, California station KABC-TV appears to have done just that, by reporting uncritically on claims by the LAPD that two people were detained at the protest for “pretending to be media.”

The two were, in fact, journalists, according to reporter Mel Buer, who was at the protest and was also detained, and Adam Rose, who’s been exhaustively tracking the recent attacks for the LA Press Club. Rose’s tracking spreadsheet identifies the detained journalists as Nate Gowdy and Carrie Schreck.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker reported that LAPD officers detained Gowdy and Schreck, who were working together to report on the protest, because they didn’t have physical press badges.

A lack of physical press credentials isn’t a good enough reason to stop a journalist from reporting under the First Amendment, and it certainly isn’t a good enough reason under the order entered by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit by the Los Angeles Press Club restraining the LAPD’s mistreatment of journalists covering protests. Even guidance from the LAPD’s chief of police says that a lack of credentials isn’t enough to justify a detention.

Instead, officers should have considered all the evidence that Gowdy and Schreck were at the protest to gather the news, like the statements from other credentialed reporters who vouched for them, their camera equipment, and Gowdy’s offer to show digital credentials or prove through a quick Google search that he and Schreck were journalists. And if they were still in doubt, officers were required to grant Gowdy and Schreck’s requests to speak to a supervisor.

KABC-TV, which calls itself the “West Coast flagship” of Disney’s ABC-owned TV station group, also should have known better than to simply repeat a statement from the LAPD that people were arrested for “pretending” to be press.

The government often makes this claim and uses it as a justification for why it “can’t” respect the First Amendment rights of journalists and simply must continue to beat and terrorize them along with protesters. But research has shown that protesters or others claiming to be press is rare. Any time government officials make this claim, journalists should be skeptical and investigate it before reporting it.

Journalists must bring a healthy dose of skepticism to any statements by the LAPD about its treatment of the press. The LAPD knows that it violates the First Amendment and California law to detain or otherwise interfere with journalists covering protests, but it continues to do so anyway.

It seems to prefer to risk contempt of court or massive settlements rather than respect the First Amendment, and it apparently has no compunction about making false statements to the press about its actions.

The only response available to journalists — other than suing to enforce their rights — is to report, accurately, on every single First Amendment violation by the LAPD. If they do, perhaps the citizens of Los Angeles will make clear to elected officials and law enforcement leaders that they won’t tolerate their police force acting in such a lawless manner.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated Aug. 14 to include new information about the contempt motion filed by the Los Angeles Press Club.

The police raid of the Marion County Record’s newsroom on Aug. 11, 2023, shocked the country but proved to be just one of a series of alarming attacks on local journalism that year. It was also a preview of how lawless and incompetent governments can use strained constructions of the law as pretext to retaliate against journalists they dislike, as we now see not only in small-town America but at the federal level. As the death of Record co-owner Joan Meyer the next day tragically proved, by the time justice takes its course — if it ever does — the damage has often already been done.

We asked investigative journalist Jessica McMaster to reflect on her award-winning coverage of the raid for KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Missouri. The interview is below. You can also read about or watch our discussion with Record publisher Eric Meyer earlier this year.

On a Friday afternoon in 2023, news broke of a police raid of the Marion County Record newsroom and its publisher Eric Meyer’s home. Did you realize right away that this needed to be not just a statewide story but a national one?

I realized right away this was a big story. Once the news broke that Joan Meyer died, I knew we had to go to Marion — the backlash was immediate and the responses were coming in from across the country.

Over the course of many months, it became clear that the raid wasn’t a random instance of police overresponding to a citizen complaint. Details began to emerge about local officials, including the police chief, Gideon Cody, and their conduct before, during, and after the raid — even before coming to Marion. Plenty of great local journalists did amazing work covering the story, but you seemed to get a large share of the big scoops. Without divulging any confidences, how were you able to pull it off, especially being based in Kansas City, not particularly close to Marion?

I worked a lot of hours. In the beginning, we stayed overnight in Marion. After that, it was a lot of driving back and forth, while taking calls from sources at all hours of the night. I’d been a journalist long enough to know that a story this big doesn’t die down for a few weeks. We made the commitment to drive the five-hour round trip daily. I didn’t always know what our angle would be, but I knew I’d find it.

“If journalists are not willing to report on the ongoing attacks against the free press, who will?”

Talk about the level of transparency — or lack thereof — that you encountered from government officials, both in Marion and statewide, during your reporting on the raid. What were some of the challenges you needed to overcome, in terms of secrecy and accessing information that was of public interest?

Gideon Cody wasn’t talking. The county attorney wasn’t talking. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation was saying very little. Almost immediately, it had the appearance that everyone involved in this was covering their own tail — and of course they were. This was a huge mess. We leaned on the gift of open records laws to get most of our information. Getting emails and text messages helped piece the parts of the story together that those in power wanted to remain a secret. We knew they’d try and block us — we were prepared to fight back. There were times when we had to get our attorneys involved when information was being withheld. On a story like this, the details don’t reveal the truth all at once. It trickles out over time. It’s always fun to look back and see how it all comes together — one information request, or leak, at a time.

At Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), we were glued to your X feed for real-time updates. We probably weren’t the only ones. Can you talk about the challenge of breaking news on social media while also investigating the bigger stories?

This is one of my favorite parts about covering a big story — connecting with people in real time. I had people from other countries sending me emails and tweeting to me that they were following me for updates. I was not asked to use social media in real time by my employer — it’s just something I’d become accustomed to doing since early on in my career. With Marion, we were getting updates constantly — social media made it easy to get that information out quickly. I don’t see using social media as a challenge — I think it’s a tool to connect with our followers more authentically and bring them along on the journey with us. Of course, if I have to get my broadcast script in urgently, or I have to be on camera within the next few minutes, I’ll take a break from providing live updates and come back to it once I’m done.

Were there any stories you were able to break while covering the raid that you felt were particularly important to the public’s understanding of what went on?

We broke so many stories over the first couple of months. I remember driving to Marion during that first week of coverage. I didn’t know what the story would be on this particular day. It was our plan to find the story once we got there. About an hour into our trip, while driving past a cornfield, my cellphone rings and it’s the attorney for Marion County Record. He tips me off that the county attorney has revoked the search warrants. He gave me a two-minute head start before he planned to tell all the other reporters. This was arguably the biggest break in the case — it’s the first time officials publicly admitted the raids shouldn’t have happened. This squashed any doubts of wrongdoing on behalf of the newspaper — and people, especially in Marion — did have their doubts. So, of course, I’m scrambling to get this information out there. Minutes after I broke the news on X, the county attorney sent a press release to all newsrooms with his statement on revoking the warrants.

“It’s hard for a lot of us to grasp that so many people, in positions of power, failed in such spectacular fashion to do their jobs.”

What insights did you come away with about the state of press freedom in Kansas and in the United States?

This was a massive failure by several people within the justice system. I think that’s what’s so shocking about this entire thing — most of us assume a police chief would understand press freedom laws. If a police chief doesn’t, we’d assume a county attorney would. If a county attorney doesn’t, we’d assume a district judge would. If no one understands these laws — surely someone will look it up. The amount of layers Gideon Cody’s attack on the newspaper survived is astonishing. What did all these people, who are supposed to understand the law, think the response would be? I think it’s hard for a lot of us to grasp that so many people, in positions of power, failed in such spectacular fashion to do their jobs.

Do you think the raid had an ongoing chilling effect on journalism?

I think the chilling effect comes from a culmination of attacks that have been launched against the free press over the past several years. We’ve seen this play out in other instances, during protests for example, where police assault or arrest journalists for doing their jobs. I think Marion was another example of that.

Despite your award-winning work on the raid and all the other great work you’ve done, less than two years after the raid, your position at KSHB-TV, Kansas City’s NBC affiliate, was eliminated. What does that say about the state of the news industry and whether local investigative reporting is valued these days?

The company I worked for always valued investigative journalism — it’s why I stayed in my position for a decade. I think what we’re seeing is that many local newsrooms are becoming more and more risk averse. I personally felt this shift over the past few years. When newsrooms operate from a place of fear, it’s very difficult for reporters to do their job, especially investigative reporters who, by nature, do more high-risk, accountability-focused stories.

What’s next for you? I saw that your X post about the layoff said your time as an investigative journalist was coming to an end. Are you done with journalism or are you going to look for a way back in? And why?

I love journalism. I believe in its purpose. I believe in its power. We need solid journalists who aren’t afraid to hold the powerful accountable. That said, I don’t see myself stepping back into a newsroom. At least not anytime soon. I took the summer off to focus on my kids and reflect on what I want to do next, which has been such a gift. I plan to keep writing and creating content for something I believe in.

Journalists often feel like covering press freedom stories is difficult, because they’re making themselves the story or because their objectivity will be questioned, for example. What do you say to that, and what’s your advice to journalists and editors wondering whether it’s a good idea to report on press freedom violations?

Stick to the facts. That’s my advice. While I didn’t initially know why police raided the newspaper, I knew this was fundamentally wrong. I knew police should’ve served a subpoena, as opposed to busting down the doors. I knew the free press has protections, both locally and federally. All of that gave me grounds to cover this story. It can be uncomfortable reporting on something so closely tied to our personal lives — but if journalists are not willing to report on the ongoing attacks against the free press, who will?

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s the 136th day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 55th day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.

Paramount’s $36 million babysitter

Paramount and Skydance Media finally completed their merger this week. To get there, Paramount paid $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s absurdly frivolous lawsuit against CBS News, while Skydance reportedly will chip in $20 million in Trump-friendly PSAs.

So now Trump will leave them alone, right? Of course not. Skydance also committed to Federal Communications Commission chair and Trump bootlicker Brendan Carr to appoint a “bias ombudsman.” Skydance CEO David Ellison assured skeptics that the position will be a “transparency vehicle, not an oversight vehicle.” He promised that “we’re not being overseen by the FCC or anyone else.”

Carr sees it differently. He told The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr that the FCC is in a “trust but verify posture,” noting that “when you make a filing at the FCC, we have rules and regulations that deal with false representations to the agency.” He added, “I’m confident that we’re going to stay in touch with [Skydance and Paramount] and track this issue.”

It sure sounds like Carr’s leaving the door wide open to threaten regulatory action whenever CBS broadcasts something he doesn’t like. Carr — who intends to monitor bias while wearing the president’s bust as a lapel pin — is the poster child for why the Constitution bars the government from meddling in newsrooms’ editorial decisions. Carr has also said he’s keeping his FCC’s nonsense investigation into CBS open, giving him another cudgel to wield if journalists forget who’s boss. There’s $36 million well spent.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Advocacy Director Seth Stern talked more about Carr’s censorial antics and our attorney disciplinary complaint against him on Legal AF’s “Court of History” podcast on the MeidasTouch network. Watch it here.

FPF’s barrage of FOIAs seeks to combat secrecy

Since our Freedom of Information Act request exposed the lies underpinning the Trump administration’s crackdown on leaks to journalists, FPF has filed over 100 more FOIAs to learn how the administration is targeting journalists and stifling dissent.

We put together a list of our top 10 most urgent FOIA requests. Read more here.

How federal law enables retaliation against incarcerated journalists

These days the president of the United States files frivolous lawsuits at an alarming clip, including against news outlets that displease him. He’s far from the only prominent public figure abusing the federal court system in this way.

And yet, Congress has not seen fit to pass a federal “anti-SLAPP” law to stop powerful billionaires and politicians from pursuing strategic lawsuits against public participation. But powerless prisoners? That’s another story. If they want access to the federal courts, they need to navigate the Prison Litigation Reform Act — a maze of onerous procedural requirements.

We hosted a webinar with incarcerated journalist Jeremy Busby and two attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, Nina Patel and Corene Kendrick, to hear more about how the law silences journalism. Read and watch here.

Don’t let the leading voice for digital journalists be silenced

For decades, the National Press Photographers Association has protected the rights of news photographers and videographers. But recently, NPPA announced that it faces financial difficulties. We spoke to NPPA’s longtime General Counsel, Mickey Osterreicher, about NPPA’s work and the impact on the First Amendment if it shutters. You can support the NPPA’s programs here.

Privacy policy update

We’ve updated FPF’s privacy policy to include a new payment processor and our use of Fight for the Future’s activism APIs. See the updated policy for details.

FPF’s Stern spoke to Protect the Protest — a coalition of nonprofit organizations fighting back against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, of which we are a proud member — about what the Paramount merger means for press freedom.

This is an obvious violation of reporters’ rights. Secret Service members should have basic First Amendment training, especially if they are going to be dispatched in the field.

The government that has killed more journalists than all other countries combined over the last few years shouldn’t be lecturing a newspaper about anything — let alone an obviously true story.

An unfortunate decision, but this might be one of the rare instances when this Supreme Court accidentally does some good. We wrote last year about how this rule impacts the press.

First, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a public records request that uncovered how Home Depot and Lowe’s are cooperating with cops. Then, 404 Media made the story free thanks to their commitment to dropping paywalls for public records-based reporting.

We’re skeptical of the government’s excuses for deleting habeas corpus from an online copy of the Constitution. Let us guess, the next “glitch” makes the First Amendment disappear?

Rachel Maddow discussed our disciplinary complaint against Carr as an example of using the legal profession’s standards “as a way to stand up and push back against” attacks on the press.

For decades, one organization has dedicated itself to protecting the rights of news photographers and videographers. The National Press Photographers Association has led countless First Amendment battles to protect visual journalists’ right to document and the public’s right to see and hear the news.

The organization’s general counsel, Mickey Osterreicher, is often at the forefront of those fights. He and NPPA have protected the First Amendment right to record in public, limited senseless government regulations restricting photography and recording, and even won a groundbreaking settlement with the New York Police Department over its treatment of journalists at protests.

But recently, NPPA announced that it faces financial difficulties. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) spoke to Osterreicher about NPPA’s work and the impact on the First Amendment if it shutters. You can read our full conversation below, and you can donate to NPPA’s programs here.

You’ve been NPPA’s general counsel since 2005, and you’ve also been a news photographer. How have the legal issues facing visual journalists changed over the years, and what are the most pressing issues they face today?

Both from a practical and legal standpoint, being a journalist was a lot simpler when I was a photojournalist. One of the biggest challenges I now face is trying to answer the question from police and lawmakers, “Who is a journalist?” and, during a protest, “Who gets to stay after an order to disperse?”

But once those press access rights have been attained, what good is it if visual journalists cannot make a decent living after risking their health and safety because their images are being misappropriated without permission, credit, or compensation? So it is a combination of dealing with First Amendment and copyright issues that keeps me up most nights.

That is to say nothing of the exponential use of generative artificial intelligence that has economically impacted the market for news photography as well as creating ethical challenges for visual journalists and public perception.

Tell us more about how the rise of AI-generated images and deepfakes is affecting the work and rights of visual journalists.

For visual journalism, generative artificial intelligence is the worst of both worlds, where millions of images (still and video) are ingested to train AI models without payment to the creators and the public can no longer believe what they see without wondering if what they are viewing is a true depiction of what really happened or an artificially created image. Even worse, this technology now provides an additional layer of ambiguity to those who claim that actual images of real events are “fake news.”

You’ve trained many law enforcement officers about journalists’ First Amendment rights, especially when they’re covering political conventions and protests. What are the most important things for police officers to know about press freedom, and how is NPPA uniquely positioned to provide that training?

I have three goals when training police and journalists about press freedoms. One: that police are not sued for abridging First Amendment rights of citizens and journalists, costing taxpayers dearly with money that could be better spent for police recruitment and retention or equipment. Two: that journalists are able to do their jobs without being harassed, injured, or arrested. Three: that the public is informed, which is the basis for the First Amendment — that being the desire by the founding fathers for the right of the public to receive information, and be an informed electorate.

As “the voice of visual journalists” since 1946, NPPA is uniquely positioned to foster improved police-press-public relations in an era when it is most needed by instilling greater respect for the roles each plays in our democracy. We’ve provided these trainings to law enforcement agencies nationwide for almost 20 years, with scores of departments and hundreds of officers being trained, including the entire Minnesota State Patrol as part of the settlement terms of a federal civil rights lawsuit, as well as the start of training with the NYPD regarding the new policies and procedures implemented as a result of the settlement of our lawsuit.

“Should our voice be muted, its silence will be deafening.”

What I believe also adds to NPPA’s credibility is my background as a photojournalist with over forty years’ experience in print and broadcast, my experience as a First Amendment attorney, and my understanding of the challenges facing law enforcement from having been a uniformed reserve deputy sheriff with the Erie County Sheriff’s Office since 1976 and working closely with law enforcement through various associations and committees.

That experience working with police departments — which not many press freedom organizations have — has also allowed you to get involved in many other issues that are important to all journalists, not just visual ones. Tell us about your work on police radio encryption and other ways you’re able to leverage the work you’ve done training police departments.

The encryption of police radio transmissions is a growing problem nationwide, because for almost a century, newsrooms and journalists have relied on the monitoring of those broadcasts to cover breaking news and other matters of public concern.

One place where such coverage is critical is New York City, where so many newsworthy events occur and where, because of the congested vehicle traffic, time is of the essence in getting to the scene. A few years ago, the NYPD announced that it would begin encrypting its transmissions. NPPA joined a consortium of news organizations asking to work with NYPD to allow journalists to continue to have real-time access to those broadcasts. Despite meeting with police officials, testifying before the city council and submitting a white paper on the subject, the NYPD has refused to discuss this issue further, and many of the important police frequencies have already been encrypted.

The consortium then supported a state bill that would allow for press access. That bill passed both houses and is awaiting the governor’s signature. NPPA has also worked with press groups around the country to address this issue.

Another problem we helped to solve was an exemption for journalists to a New York law that banned anyone in the state (except for certain “eligible professions”) from the “purchase, taking possession of, sale, exchange, giving or disposing of body armor.”

Additionally, NPPA was instrumental in opposing an Arizona bill that barred anyone recording police from getting closer than 15 feet to an officer without their permission. I drafted several letters to the legislature joined by 30 press organizations cautioning against the unconstitutionality of the proposed law, which was ultimately passed after the measure was amended to an 8-foot distance. I then worked with the American Civil Liberties Union and Arizona Broadcasters Association to obtain a permanent injunction prohibiting enforcement of the law. NPPA has also filed amicus briefs in two other constitutional challenges to similar laws in Indiana and Louisiana.

When the White House restricted the Associated Press’s access over its use of the term ‘Gulf of Mexico’ (a move that NPPA and FPF condemned), it raised concerns about the chilling effects of such retaliation on journalists. If presidents can exclude outlets or photographers from the press pool for editorial decisions, what does that mean for press freedom and the role of visual journalists?

As NPPA stated, such actions by the administration are unacceptable as both an attempt at prior restraint and a blatant retaliation and chilling abridgment of the First Amendment rights of the AP and its journalists.

Unfortunately, we have seen both the federal district court as well as the circuit court hearing the appeal in this case give wide latitude and discretion to the White House as to who it admits to cover certain events. Additional fallout from this has been the White House Correspondents Association losing its long-standing control over the press pool rotation as well as other “disfavored” media outlets being barred from inclusion in the pool.

All these actions taken by the administration are having a chilling effect on press coverage of the government and are eviscerating press freedom. The NPPA continues to work with news and press freedom organizations to advocate and support the right of the public to be informed.

Over the years, NPPA has had to oppose a number of laws that prohibit or limit taking pictures in public places as well as using drones to capture aerial footage. What should journalists do if they’re stopped and told they can’t take pictures or record in public?

Our staunch advocacy has led to the right to photograph and record in traditional public forums being “clearly established” in three-quarters of the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, which is key to successfully bringing civil rights claims against those who try to limit or interfere with those rights.

While NPPA was initially successful in challenging Texas drone regulations, that decision was reversed on appeal. But we have been effective in ensuring that language protecting the First Amendment rights of journalists to use drones for newsgathering be included in government regulations.

NPPA has provided extensive training as to what journalists can do if they’re stopped and told they can’t take pictures or record in public. The foremost advice is to meet with law enforcement on a regular basis to ensure that these rights are honored by police and to discuss how best to improve police-press interactions. While in the field, it is crucial to maintain situational awareness and pay attention to police and crowd movements to avoid being encircled (kettled). Always have an exit strategy, as it is always better to move to a different location than be arrested. If police stop or question you about your activities, make sure to identify yourself as a journalist.

What will journalism lose if NPPA is forced to close its doors?

It would be a significant loss to not only visual journalists but to journalism itself if NPPA were to cease as an organization. For almost 80 years, NPPA has strongly advocated for the rights of visual journalists and now more than ever that unique voice is needed as more journalists are required to report not only with words but images. It also comes at a time when the importance of truthful images could not be greater.

While there are many other organizations supporting the First Amendment and press freedoms, none is more exclusively dedicated to the advancement and protection of visual journalism in its role as a vital public service than the NPPA. Our code of ethics is often cited as exemplary of what visual journalism should strive to achieve. Should our voice be muted, its silence will be deafening.

Donate to NPPA’s programs here to help protect the rights of visual journalists and the public’s right to know.

These days the president of the United States files frivolous lawsuits at an alarming clip, including against news outlets that displease him. He’s far from the only prominent public figure abusing the federal court system in this way, steering scarce judicial resources away from meritorious lawsuits by ordinary people who have suffered serious damages.

And yet, Congress has not seen fit to pass a federal “anti-SLAPP” law to stop billionaires and politicians from pursuing strategic lawsuits against public participation. But powerless prisoners? That’s another story. If they want access to the federal courts they need to navigate the Prison Litigation Reform Act — a maze of onerous procedural requirements. It’s supposedly intended to stop the courts from being burdened by inmates’ frivolous lawsuits.

We held a webinar to discuss the PLRA’s impact on incarcerated journalists and the journalists on the outside who cover the prison system, featuring Jeremy Busby, a journalist and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) columnist who is incarcerated in Texas, and American Civil Liberties Union attorneys Nina Patel and Corene Kendrick. Patel is senior policy counsel at the ACLU Justice Division and Kendrick is the deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

As Kendrick explained, the PLRA originated as one of the Clinton administration’s “tough on crime” initiatives as it pivoted right in preparation for the 1996 presidential election. The law was enacted despite a lack of evidence that incarcerated people file baseless lawsuits any more frequently than anyone else, presidents or otherwise. She said the law “singles out one disfavored group of people and categorically denies them equal access to the courts.”

She described how the harm extends beyond the impacted litigants, as the kinds of court filings foreclosed by the PLRA are “oftentimes the best way that information about conditions in our nation’s prisons and jails reach the public and members of the media.”

“The PLRA has, in practice, served as a real barrier for journalists to get any sort of information” about facilities that “get billions and billions of dollars a year to lock up human beings,” Kendrick said. “The ability to communicate with the outside world is so circumscribed and is monitored and recorded. And you know, once something gets to a federal court and it’s filed on the docket, it is out there.”

But when the court dismisses a case for procedural reasons without any consideration of whether the claims are true, all journalists are left with are untested allegations that they rarely have the resources to corroborate. “That happens all the time, and unfortunately, and it adversely affects journalists greatly,” Kendrick said.

Lawsuits are also the only recourse available to incarcerated journalists, who often report relentless retaliation when their work upsets prison officials. That’s what happened to Busby when he helped expose deplorable conditions inside the prison where he was housed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Busby said he was transferred to four prisons, each overcrowded with people sick with COVID, before landing in a cell without a mattress or sheets, where he was kept for six weeks. His property was damaged or seized, and he was written bogus disciplinary charges that were later overturned.

He brought a federal lawsuit, but because he was retaliated against in four different prisons, the judge said the PLRA required four separate lawsuits in four different courts. “I wasn’t able to successfully keep up with four active litigations in four different courts in four different counties, from the solitary confinement cell that I was being held in,” Busby explained, resulting in his lawsuits each being dismissed on procedural grounds before the merits of his claims could be adjudicated.

Busby is a college graduate and accomplished writer — if he can’t navigate the PLRA, it is all the more difficult for an average member of the prison population to do so. Even the experienced lawyers on the webinar acknowledged how challenging it can be to comply with the PLRA when representing their incarcerated clients. Incarcerated litigants, Busby noted, must also pay court fees — in his case, a $400 fee became $1,600 when his lawsuit was split into four.

“You don’t get paid for work here in Texas, and so most guys, they don’t even want the $400 thing against their account because their family members can maybe send $20 for toothpaste and deodorant every month or so, or every two or three months, and they don’t want to sacrifice their deodorant and toothpaste money to pursue this lawsuit,” he said.

So what’s the point of the PLRA? As Patel noted, “The courts are well equipped to throw out lawsuits that are frivolous,” and do so every day in cases involving non-incarcerated people. Patel believes the real problem the PLRA is meant to address isn’t that incarcerated people file so many invalid claims — it’s that they file so many valid ones.

With around two million people incarcerated in the United States, “a functional system where someone can go to the courts and have their constitutional violations in prison litigated and then compensated would break most prison systems in this country,” Patel explained. “That is the dirty truth of the PLRA.”

She added, “Everyone knows, and it’s not a secret, that it would bankrupt the system, and it would break it, and that we couldn’t do what we do in this country, which is lead the world in mass incarceration.”

Watch the full webinar here, and subscribe to our newsletters to get notice of future events.

Note: FPF Advocacy Director Seth Stern, who authored this article and moderated the webinar, is on the board of Busby’s nonprofit organization, JoinJeremy.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s been 129 days that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 47th day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.

Lose the law license, keep the lapel pin

This week we filed an ethics complaint with the Washington, D.C., attorney disciplinary commission against Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, calling for him to be disbarred.

Carr’s approval of the $8 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media, which came after Paramount agreed to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle his frivolous lawsuit, was the last straw. It’s clear that Carr is abusing his power to help the president, whose face he wears as a lapel pin (seriously), use the court system to extract payments that U.S. senators and plenty others have called illegal bribes.

“Trump’s shakedown of Paramount could not have worked without a credible threat that the administration would not approve Paramount’s merger with Skydance unless it paid up,” Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Advocacy Director Seth Stern told Status. “It seems obvious to us that a licensed attorney should not be able to help his boss make a mockery of the legal system by laundering bribes through the courts without consequence.”

Read the complaint here.

FPF sues over Qatari plane secrecy

Two months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo giving the Trump administration permission to accept a $400 million jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One.

The memo argued this was permissible as long as the plane was transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of Trump’s term. But the document, and Bondi’s basis for that politically convenient conclusion, have never been made public.

FPF, represented by watchdog group American Oversight, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit this week to force the Justice Department to release the memo. Read more here.

Google search exploited to censor reporting on censorship

On a Friday afternoon in mid-June, independent journalist Jack Poulson made a curious discovery: An article that we published about the aggressive attempts of a San Francisco-based tech executive named Maury Blackman to censor Poulson’s reporting about his sealed domestic violence arrest had, itself, disappeared from Google search results.

After Poulson alerted us to the issue, we investigated, and found that the article vanished from Google search because of a novel maneuver that apparently hasn’t been publicly well documented before: a sustained and coordinated abuse of Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool. Now that Google says it has fixed the glitch so it can’t be further exploited, we can reveal what we found. Read more here.

The libel-proof president

Trump’s latest frivolous lawsuit, against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, faces plenty of legal obstacles.

One of them should be the “libel-proof plaintiff” doctrine, which theorizes that some people are so reputationally damaged, either across the board or on a certain topic, that even false statements about them can’t make it quantifiably worse.

As Stern wrote for The Palm Beach Post, the doctrine is often used against private litigants with long criminal records. That’s a tough sell to judges who believe in rehabilitation, which is likely why the doctrine is rarely applied. A better use may be as an added layer of defense to libel suits by disgraced politicians and public figures like Trump. Read the op-ed here.

What we’re reading

’If You Can Keep It’: Weakening whistleblower protections (NPR). The Trump administration is trying to portray journalism as a threat to national security. FPF’s Lauren Harper debunked these claims on “1A.”

Anna Gomez’s lonely fight (Columbia Journalism Review). Despite the FCC’s obligation to refrain from censorship, Commissioner Anna Gomez says a local station manager instructed reporters to “be extra careful about how they described the administration, because they couldn’t afford to be dragged before the FCC.” Also listen to FPF’s June conversation with Gomez here.

This U.S. citizen recorded an immigration arrest. Officers told him to delete it or face charges. (Reason). The constitutional right to record law enforcement applies equally to immigration officers, and this story shows why.

The fight for free speech goes corporate (Columbia Journalism Review). “People can’t trust a news outlet that is bribing the same officials it’s supposed to hold accountable,” FPF’s Stern said.

A more perfect media (Free Press). Read this new report on corporate influence on the media from Free Press (not the Bari Weiss one). It accompanies their new Media Capitulation Index.

On a Friday afternoon in mid-June, independent journalist Jack Poulson made a curious discovery: An article that we published about the aggressive attempts of a San Francisco-based tech executive named Maury Blackman to censor Poulson’s reporting about his sealed domestic violence arrest had, itself, disappeared from Google search results.

After Poulson alerted us that day, we immediately investigated that weekend. Even when searching for the article’s exact headline – “Anatomy of a censorship campaign: A tech exec’s crusade to stifle journalism” – it didn’t appear on Google search. It did, however, show up atop results on other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing. No other articles published by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) seemed to have been suppressed by Google.

A Google search conducted by FPF on June 17 of the exact headline didn’t return the article. Other FPF articles appeared normally.

The article removed from Google search reported on a sweeping, persistent effort by Blackman or his apparent representatives to silence reporting by Poulson and his nonprofit Tech Inquiry.

The censorship campaign started after Poulson reported in 2023 about the executive’s 2021 arrest on suspicion of domestic violence against his then-25-year-old girlfriend in San Francisco. Blackman, 53 at the time, was never charged or convicted, and the alleged victim recanted her statements. A California court sealed the arrest report in 2022.

Shortly after the publication of Poulson’s article, Blackman resigned as CEO of Premise Data Corp., a surveillance technology firm with U.S. military contracts.

When Blackman was still Premise’s CEO, the company hired a private investigation and security service firm, and filed legal requests in an attempt to unmask Poulson’s confidential sources. Someone claiming to represent Blackman submitted fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests targeting Poulson’s article. Blackman’s attorneys also roped the San Francisco city attorney into an intimidation campaign against Poulson and Substack, which hosts his newsletter.

These tactics all failed.

But that wasn’t all. Blackman also filed a baseless defamation lawsuit against Poulson, his website hosts, and Tech Inquiry that was later dismissed on First Amendment grounds under California’s anti-SLAPP statute (SLAPP, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, refers to legal actions brought to chill speech). Blackman is appealing the dismissal.

And in April, Blackman even filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco for allegedly releasing the arrest report. One of the exhibits to a later filing included a May 2024 letter sent by Blackman’s lawyer to an individual that he thought was Poulson’s source, threatening legal action and demanding a $7.5 million settlement payment.

How Google search was exploited

There are several well-known tactics used to suppress or remove results from Google search. Copyright claims (legitimate and frivolous), court orders (real, forged, or otherwise fishy), and warning letters from government agencies have all been used to disappear search results from Google, sometimes as the result of the work of shady reputation management companies.

Our article, however, was vanished from Google search using a novel maneuver that apparently hasn’t been publicly well documented before: a sustained and coordinated abuse of Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool. (In 2023, in response to a public support request flagging the abuse of the tool to de-index pages, Google’s search liaison said that the company would look into it further, but provided no additional information. The request has since been locked and the replies disabled.)

Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool

This tool is supposed to allow those who are not a site’s owner to request the removal from search results of web pages that are no longer live (returning a “404 error”), or to request an update in search of web pages that display outdated or obsolete information in returned results.

However, a malicious actor could, until recently, disappear a legitimate article by submitting a removal request for a URL that resembled the target article but led to a “404 error.” By altering the capitalization of a URL slug, a malicious actor apparently could take advantage of a case-insensitivity bug in Google’s automated system of content removal.

That is exactly what happened to our article about the censorship campaign against Poulson. Someone reported an invalid variation of the article’s URL and requested its removal from Google search results. When Google’s crawler encountered the “404 error” following the report, it not only de-indexed the reported URL but also erroneously removed the live, valid article, possibly alongside every other variant of the URL, from search results.

Each time our original article was re-indexed by Google, someone submitted a new removal request for a slightly modified, oddly-capitalized version of the URL’s slug, triggering the same process, and so on. This cycle allowed the person or people submitting the reports to continuously suppress our article from search visibility — resulting in a game of digital Whac-A-Mole.

Nine removal requests targeting the same article on FPF’s site between May 7 and June 23, 2025.

Once we identified the pattern, we took action by canceling the active removal requests in our Google Search Console and manually re-indexing the article so it would reappear in Google search results.

But we weren’t the only targets of this de-indexing scheme. After we alerted Poulson about what we had found, he discovered that two of his articles were similarly targeted using the same Refresh Outdated Content tool during the same time frame as ours.

In total, the two Poulson articles were targeted using this method 21 times. Our article was targeted nine times. The attacks on both websites spanned the same period, May 7 to June 23, strongly suggesting that a single actor was behind the campaign and that the campaign was forced to an end once Google introduced its fix.

Google’s ‘rare’ response and fix

When we reached out about the removal of our article, a Google spokesperson confirmed the abuse to us in an emailed statement on June 27. Initially, the company told us that the Refresh Outdated Content tool “helps ensure our search results are up to date,” adding that they are “vigilant in monitoring abuse,” and that they have “relisted pages that were wrongly impacted for this specific issue.”

This vague response did not explain whether Google already knew about the vulnerability of its tool for abuse, and was unclear about whether only our and Poulson’s pages had been re-indexed, or other websites were also impacted by similar attacks.

In a response to another question about whether this vulnerability has been widely exploited and how many other web pages could have been improperly de-indexed as a result of the abuse of this tool, the spokesperson claimed that “the issue only impacted a tiny fraction of websites,” which is a very unhelpful answer given the internet’s 1 billion websites.

Upon pressing Google with another round of detailed questions about our findings, the company was more forthcoming: “Confirming that we’ve rolled out a fix to prevent this type of abuse of the ‘Refresh Outdated Content Tool,’ the spokesperson said, but added that they “won’t be able to share anymore on this.”

While Google did the right thing by fixing this vulnerability, it’s disappointing that the company is unwilling to be more transparent. Google says that it’s committed to maximizing access to information. If that’s true, it has an obligation to the public to be transparent about how its products can be misused in such a basic way to censor speech.

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Did Google know about the problem before we alerted it? Is it aware of other methods used to maliciously de-index search results? The company isn’t saying. But at least now that Google has confirmed that they’ve introduced a universal fix to avoid further exploitation of that bug, we can reveal the scheme’s details.

Google allowing those other than sites’ owners to remove pages from Google search results “is obviously a huge problem,” said Jason Kelley, director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The other issue is the lack of transparency from Google. Site owners would probably never find out if this feature was used to impact their search results, and probably never will find out that this had happened to them now that it’s corrected.”

Kelley described the company’s admission of the issue’s existence and taking it seriously as “rare.”

(EFF lawyers represented Poulson in the case.)

‘Legal failure’

Poulson told us it was “humbling” to realize that a 600-word article on the CEO of a surveillance firm could lead to such cascading censorship efforts, including the recent effort to “sabotage Google search results.”

“Blackman’s attempt to use the courts to scrub his felony arrest report and related news articles from the internet was not just a legal failure,” Susan Seager, a First Amendment lawyer who represents Tech Inquiry, told FPF. She added that his libel and privacy lawsuit against Poulson, Tech Inquiry, Substack, and Amazon Web Services “brought even more publicity to his arrest.”

On Tuesday, Poulson, Tech Inquiry, and Substack were awarded close to $400,000 in attorneys’ fees by the San Francisco Superior Court.

Who might be behind it?

Because Google does not document who submits removal requests through the Refresh Outdated Content tool, we have no way of knowing for certain who was behind the attempts to suppress search results featuring articles by us and Poulson.

We reached out to Blackman, who is now the CEO of a reputation management agency, ironically named The Transparency Company. We asked whether he or one of his associates reported our or Poulson’s articles using the Refresh Outdated Content tool or otherwise attempted to have Google de-index or suppress them. He didn’t respond to our requests for comment.

The good news is that all three articles — ours and Poulson’s — are restored on Google search, and Google claims to have fixed this problem. Plus, the new round of censorship inspired a new round of reporting, including the article you’re reading right now and a new article by Poulson, also published today.

Maybe now, anyone attempting to abuse legal or technical tools to censor journalism will learn the hard truth about the Streisand Effect: it will almost inevitably draw more attention, not less.

Editor’s note: On Aug. 1, two days after publication, this article itself was targeted for scrubbing from the internet using the very method it described. On that day, journalist Jack Poulson’s related article about the subject was also targeted using the same method. Both requests were denied by Google because of the fix requested by FPF.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), represented by nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight, filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for failing to release a legal memorandum that reportedly justified the Trump administration’s acceptance of a $400 million jet gifted by the Qatari government in May.

The luxury aircraft — set to be retrofitted for use as Air Force One to the tune of hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars and later transferred to President Donald Trump’s private foundation — has raised serious legal and ethical concerns. Multiple experts and lawmakers from both parties have raised questions about whether accepting such a gift from a foreign government violates the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause and federal ethics rules. Additionally, while Trump claims Qatar reached out and offered the jet as a “gift” to him, media reports the opposite is true — his administration approached Qatar.

“It shouldn’t take 620 days to release a single, time-sensitive document,” said Lauren Harper, Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy. “How many flights could Trump have taken on his new plane in the same amount of time it would have taken the DOJ to release this one document? The government’s inability to administer FOIA makes it too easy for agencies to keep secrets, and nonexistent disclosure rules around donations to presidential libraries provide easy cover for bad actors and potential corruption.”

“President Trump’s deal to take a $400 million luxury jet from a foreign government deserves full public scrutiny — not a stiff-arm from the Department of Justice,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, which is representing FPF in its litigation. “This is precisely the kind of corrupt arrangement that public records laws are designed to expose. The DOJ cannot sit on its hands and expect the American people to wait years for the truth while serious questions about corruption, self-dealing, and foreign influence go unanswered.”

The May 2025 memorandum, reportedly signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously lobbied on behalf of the Qatari government, purportedly concluded that the Trump administration’s acceptance of the jet was legally permissible. The administration accepted the jet just days later. The circumstances surrounding the jet deal, including reports that the transaction may have been initiated by the Trump administration and that it followed a lucrative Trump private business arrangement in Qatar, have only heightened calls for transparency.

News that the luxury jet will be donated to Trump’s private presidential library foundation after he is no longer in office follows reports that ABC News and Paramount, which was seeking government approval for a merger with Skydance, resolved litigation with President Trump by agreeing to multimillion-dollar payouts to the foundation.

FPF submitted its FOIA request for the Bondi memo on May 15. Although the DOJ granted expedited processing, the department informed FPF that the estimated time for fulfilling the request was more than 600 days. As of today, the DOJ has failed to release any responsive records or provide a further timeline for production.

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Indian Time, a newspaper that served the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, built and informed a loyal audience of Indigenous readers on the U.S.-Canada border for over 40 years.

Then, it vanished.

In late December 2024, the paper’s last edition was printed and website updates screeched to a halt. Indian Time’s hand was forced by the same pressures affecting newspapers nationwide — declining ad revenue and struggling finances. Despite breaking inimitable stories about the Mohawk Nation, the paper could not afford to keep the ink flowing.

“We thought the economic climate of Akwesasne could hold us,” said Marjorie Skidders, the longtime and last editor of Indian Time, “but it didn’t.”

Now, a population of over 10,000 people across two different countries is living under a tribal news blackout. With no paper of record, the community must rely on the local government, social media, and non-native news sources to piece together a broken portrait of Akwesasne life.

“There is no coverage of anything to hold anyone accountable, politically,” Skidders said. “There’s no coverage of meetings, there’s no coverage of gatherings.”

To better understand the demise of one of America’s oldest Indigenous newspapers and the impact on its community, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) hosted a webinar July 22 with Skidders, former Indian Time reporter and FPF contributor Isaac White, and U.S. Press Freedom Tracker Senior Reporter Stephanie Sugars.

Since the paper’s shuttering, no publication has stepped up to fill the void, White said. His frustration is compounded by the fact that he and Skidders are still the first points of contact for community members and sources they developed while at Indian Time, whom he has to remind “that the paper is closed” when they reach out to share a tip. It takes a “sensational” story, he said, to “draw outside reporters here.”

“A lot of us will say, ‘We are the invisible people,’” White said. “That’s one of the things that hurt so bad with Indian Time being gone. Who really cares about us, except for us? And I think that that’s a fair question to ask.”

He raised a couple of timely examples: Conservative commentator Ann Coulter recently posted on social media that, “We didn’t kill enough Indians,” a remark condemned by the Native American community but that drew little attention from national news outlets.

White also noted that, with all the coverage of the Trump administration’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center, there has been little mention of the fact the facility was built on land belonging to the Miccosukee Tribe.

These are stories White and Skidders would have loved to share their perspectives on, but no longer have a platform to do so, they said.

“I think that kind of encapsulates everything,” White said. “Those two instances are things that really highlight why coverage of Indian culture is not sufficient, not even close to sufficient — and why we need our independent news outlets, like Indian Time or any other ones.”

Indian Time’s uniqueness as an independent tribal publication made the loss sting all the more. Many Indigenous news outlets “fell under the wing of the tribal government,” Skidders said. That afforded Indian Time’s staff freedoms other tribal journalists often didn’t have, like reporting without fear or favor.

“We strived to work the best that we could and be independent. And we never satisfied anyone,” she added. “We were either too one way or too the other way, but we just worked to try and do the best that we could.”

Like anywhere else in the world, press freedom violations can and do occur on Indigenous lands. White himself was arrested while covering a Mohawk land claim dispute in May 2024, and a large number of arrests and assaults of journalists took place during Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017.

But documenting these incidents requires additional sensitivity, Sugars said, as few tribal constitutions enumerate press freedom protections.

“There are a large number of things that we document in terms of denial of access, demands for prior review, tribal councils having control over funding, distribution, hiring, firing, decisions, things of that nature,” she said of the Tracker. “It is challenging for us to cover those things because we don’t want to be imposing our ideas about what is wrong or right.”

White also discussed cultural differences. The notion of objectivity becomes complicated in situations where Indigenous journalists are reporting on their own neighbors, to whom they are bonded outside the domain of a journalist-source relationship.

In the moments before White was arrested covering the land claim demonstration, for example, he said he helped community elders unload food and water from a cooler and prop up a canopy to shield them from the rain. “It was just a reflex,” he said, but after he was arrested, he was afraid outside journalists would see his common courtesy as unprofessional.

“I come from a longhouse. Margie comes from a longhouse. It’s something that you just do. If wood needs to be split, you just do it. If something needs to be cooked in the cookhouse, you help,” he said. “That’s just the way that we’re taught to do things.”

When White told Skidders what happened, she empathized with his moral conflict.

“It didn’t bother me,” she said. “Wherever he goes, whatever he’s doing, he’s a Mohawk first. And he’s going to behave honorably like that.”

The Akwesasne elders, like those White helped, treasured Indian Time, Skidders said. They were, after all, the “biggest population” of the paper’s readers, and they relished staying informed about the community.

“Now it’s gone,” she added about the paper. “I don’t know how we could do it again.”

White himself is trying to keep the flame alive. He runs a podcast available on YouTube called “Sage Against the Machine” (@SageAgainstTheMachinePod), which offers a more “unfiltered look” at Mohawk news. But its “raw” and conversational nature isn’t a platform to plumb deep topics like a newspaper, and it is no replacement for the dedicated work of Indian Time.

“By the book, as a journalist, you cannot do it part time,” he said. “It’s just not feasible. It’s a loss.”

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s the 122nd day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 41st day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more.

Paramount makes its capitulation official

President Donald Trump announced this week that he’d received CBS News parent Paramount Global’s $16 million payment to settle his frivolous lawsuit. Just days later, Trump’s FCC issued its long-delayed approval of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media, confirming what we all knew — the payment has nothing to do with legal fees or liability risks and everything to do with greasing the wheels of a corrupt administration.

As Freedom of the Press Advocacy Director Seth Stern told Columbia Journalism Review, Paramount threw CBS journalists and the First Amendment under the bus, while making itself a punch line. “People can’t trust a news outlet that is bribing the same officials it’s supposed to hold accountable,” Stern said. But we’re not done fighting back against the enablers of this shakedown of a settlement — more on that soon. Read more in CJR.

Journalists starve in Gaza

Reuters, the Associated Press, BBC News and Agence France-Presse jointly expressed their alarm about the terrible plight of journalists in Gaza, and particularly the risk of starvation. As one journalist put it, “I used to chase the truth. Now I chase calories.”

“Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in war zones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them. We once again urge the Israeli authorities to allow journalists in and out of Gaza. It is essential that adequate food supplies reach the people there,” their statement said.

We told CJR that “no matter what else they do while in power, governments and presidents that supported these horrors, and tolerated the killing of journalists who reported on them, will be remembered first and foremost for their complicity.” We also published a profile of the journalist who wrote our article, in collaboration with the Intercept, about the dire situation facing journalists in Gaza, Neha Madhira. Read it here.

Radio silence on the reservation

Indian Time, a newspaper that served the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, built and informed a loyal audience of Indigenous readers for over 40 years.

But in late December 2024, the paper printed its last edition. Indian Time’s hand was forced by the same pressures affecting newspapers nationwide — namely, declining ad revenue. The paper could not afford to keep the ink flowing.

To better understand the demise of the newspaper and the impact on its community, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) hosted a webinar with Indian Time editor Marjorie Skidders, former Indian Time reporter and FPF columnist Isaac White, and U.S. Press Freedom Tracker Senior Reporter Stephanie Sugars. Read more and watch the discussion here.

ICE must stop harassing journalists

According to a recent report by AMNY, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents making arrests in New York City immigration courts are harassing journalists by photographing journalists’ press credentials and falsely telling them that common areas of the courthouse are “restricted areas” from which they can’t report.

These intimidation tactics can chill constitutionally protected reporting. That’s why FPF and other press freedom groups wrote to the New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and to the Federal Protective Service asking that they reaffirm that journalists have the right to report the news in New York courts without intimidation and that they develop policies to end ICE’s harassment of journalists.

Read the full letters here and here, and a follow-up report from AMNY here.

Comey cellphone tracking points to privacy erosion

You may remember that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into former FBI Director James Comey for posting a picture on Instagram during his beach vacation of seashells spelling out “8647.”

Since then, the government has apparently been exercising emergency authority to warrantlessly track his real-time cellphone location, despite the absence of anything resembling an emergency. This abuse of power is also a threat to journalists and sources. Read more here.

Kentucky prosecutors must drop charges

Two Cincinnati journalists were arrested in Kentucky for documenting a protest, despite zero evidence that they did anything wrong.

The absurd felony rioting charges against them were dropped this week after we, along with the Society of Professional Journalists and National Press Photographers Association, wrote a letter to prosecutors expressing our concerns. But the misdemeanor charges against them are still pending, and they shouldn’t be. Read the letter here.

What we’re reading

Hypocrisy on display (Press Club of Southwest Florida). If the Trump administration hates interview editing enough to shake down CBS for $16 million over its Kamala Harris interview, why is it prosecuting journalist Tim Burke for exposing far more significant edits by Tucker Carlson of his interview with Ye?

Trump White House removes WSJ from Scotland trip press pool over Epstein report (CNN). “Hopefully the Journal reporters who were planning to join Trump for his golf trip are relieved that they can spend their newfound free time investigating more important stories, from Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein to his unprecedented efforts to bully the press,” Stern told CNN.

This bill would fine social media companies $5 million every day for not fighting ‘terrorism’ (Reason). “The idea that the federal government even talked to social media platforms about their moderation was a major scandal … A bipartisan bill, however, would make it mandatory for social media companies to work with the federal government.”

Family, supporters urge release of Spanish-language journalist in ICE custody (The Associated Press). “Growing up, I didn’t always understand why my dad was so obsessed with his work, why he’d jump up and leave dinner to chase down a story. But now I do,” said Mario Guevara’s son, Oscar, who now works as a photojournalist.

FBI spied on journalists and activists who organized ‘Russiagate And WikiLeaks’ panel (The Dissenter). The surveillance was revealed by documents the FBI turned over to Defending Rights & Dissent as part of ongoing litigation under the Freedom of Information Act.

Neha Madhira grew up in North Texas with the TV constantly buzzing with world news. Madhira, now 24, recognized that journalism was key to keeping her family informed on the happenings back home in India. But with state-sanctioned violence limiting journalists on the ground from reporting, and few legacy media outlets with reporters that are representative of her left to report on it, Madhira also knew there were gaps to be filled.

Nearly a decade later, Madhira is bridging the gaps in Western media’s health and education coverage of the Middle East-North Africa region, South Asia, and their diasporas. The contacts she’s built have allowed her to expand her reporting focus — she recently collaborated with Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) on an article for The Intercept featuring testimonials from journalists targeted by the Israeli military.

“In a time where press freedom is definitely in question in the U.S. right now, and censorship on social media and in newsroom settings is even becoming more and more common, it’s really important for me that I stay true to my values of why I started reporting,” Madhira said. “I use freelancing to try my best to cover that gap in reporting when it comes to Western media, and try to cover the communities that I know deserve a platform.”

Madhira first spent years covering breaking news, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the social movements of 2020 for local newsrooms in Austin, Texas, while studying journalism and women’s and gender issues. But with activism movements roaring overseas, coupled with the lack of coverage on the impacts of the pandemic in India, she saw freelancing as an opportunity to cover issues happening in countries that face extreme press censorship for audiences overseas and in the U.S.

“A big part of my job during the pandemic, and even now, is reaching out to health care officials, regardless of what’s happening, to actually see who it’s affecting, why it’s affecting them, and what resources people need,” Madhira said. “If there’s a possibility that that information is being withheld from the public, that becomes a problem. How are we supposed to continue to inform and educate the public on how to stay safe during a pandemic or epidemic if we don’t even have that information to begin with?”

She has built close relationships with journalists on the ground in Iran, Afghanistan, India, Gaza, and the West Bank, relying on their reporting to reach audiences in the U.S. and abroad. Recognizing the privilege she holds, Madhira does her best to ensure their perspectives are reflected in her writing.

“I covered the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran very extensively,” she said. “Two journalists who I really looked up to were arrested around this time last year. I wrote a story on that, and I noticed that a lot of Iranian and Iranian American activists were reaching out to me, appreciating the fact that the story was written, because even writing about their release and the details of how they are doing and how journalism and activism is continuing within the country is a privilege.”

Over the past year and a half, Madhira has covered the medical and humanitarian infrastructure collapses in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the campus encampments in protest of Israel’s actions, and the shadowy organizations collaborating with the government to identify and persecute students and others who are critical of Israel.

“As we see less and less news coming out of Gaza, I urge people to not look away.”

With more than 180 journalists killed by Israel to date, media blackouts, and censorship on social media, Madhira writes to amplify the voices of her colleagues remaining on the ground, including those whose stories she wrote about in The Intercept.

“I have advocated for Palestine since I was a child, and at the beginning of October 2023, I was horrified at the language being used to dehumanize Palestinians,” she said. “As a journalist, I was seeing the gaps in Western media coverage and its support of Israel, and I wanted to help change this narrative in any way I could. As we see less and less news coming out of Gaza, I urge people to not look away and to pay closer attention to passive voice being used to describe the atrocities Palestinians continue to face every day.”

While the stories that Madhira tells are urgent and deserving of immediate attention, communicating with people on the ground in Gaza is a slow, challenging process. “Most of the people I’ve interviewed, whether that be journalists, or medical workers, or humanitarian workers, there is a small gap every single day that they have access to the internet, and we have used that to communicate with each other every single day,” she said. “I continue to do that because their voices are the most important and the most pertinent.”

Reporting from the U.S. on Palestine has not come without its own battles against censorship. Having experienced “shadow banning” that has limited visibility of her social media posts, she said the public must pay attention to the ways social media platforms moderate content to censor certain news, and she calls for users to consume content carefully. By amplifying journalists’ content on social media, independent reporting can reach wider audiences and fight against algorithmic suppression, Madhira added.

“There are a lot more people who are in the dark about what is happening than you would think,” she said. “There are so many nonprofit, independent newsrooms, not only in the U.S., but around the world who do incredible reporting for very little money, and it’s important to pay attention, because these journalists are some of the most skilled and experienced within their field.”

A recent news report about Secret Service surveillance of former FBI Director James Comey suggests that the Trump administration is abusing its spying powers.

You may remember that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into Comey for posting a picture on Instagram during his beach vacation of seashells spelling out “8647.” Conservatives claimed that Comey’s post was a threat to our 47th president, Donald Trump. Never mind that “86” is slang for banning someone or something, not killing them. There’s also that whole First Amendment thing.

Then, The New York Times reported earlier this month that the Secret Service, as part of its investigation, had Comey “followed by law enforcement authorities in unmarked cars and street clothes and tracked the location of his cellphone” as Comey returned home from his vacation, even though he had already submitted to a phone interview and agreed to an in-person interview.

As the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Jake Laperruque pointed out, that kind of surveillance — real-time location tracking based on cellphone data — generally requires court approval. Although the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on whether it requires a warrant, several other courts have held that it does.

There’s an important exception, however, to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Known as exigent circumstances, it allows for warrantless searches in emergencies. Sources told the Times that the Secret Service invoked that exact exception to justify following Comey.

But Reason Magazine does a good job explaining why that rationale is bunk:

“‘A variety of circumstances may give rise to an exigency sufficient to justify a warrantless search, including law enforcement’s need to provide emergency assistance to an occupant of a home…engage in ‘hot pursuit’ of a fleeing suspect…or enter a burning building to put out a fire and investigate its cause,’ the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in Missouri v. McNeely (2013).

“None of those factors apply here: Comey was on the move, but he was not ‘fleeing’—he was coming home from vacation. If the Secret Service really thought he warranted further scrutiny, it had plenty of time to get a warrant from a judge.”

At least three federal appeals courts have permitted warrantless tracking of real-time cellphone location in emergencies. In one case, a man with a criminal history broke a window at his former girlfriend’s home with a gun and threatened to kill her, her seven-year-old, and other family members before fleeing. In another, a man running a drug operation murdered a potential informant, leaving police concerned that other informants who had infiltrated the operation were at risk. And in the third case, a gang member previously charged with drug crimes threatened to “shoot up” an informant.

These cases are a far cry from posting a picture of seashells on social media. And even if authorities truly believed Comey intended to threaten Trump, he had no way of carrying out that threat at the time he was tracked, since Trump was in the Middle East.

In other words, in Comey’s case, the Trump administration expanded the exigent circumstances exception beyond recognition. But it isn’t the only recent example of the government abusing its power to spy using cellphone data. A recent investigation by Straight Arrow News also detected evidence of a cellphone tracking device commonly known as a “stingray” at an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest, despite DHS policy requiring a warrant for its use except in — you guessed it — exigent circumstances.

These reports should raise red flags for everyone concerned about surveillance — including journalists and their sources. We already know that the government has tracked at least some physical movements of journalists in past leak investigations. Cellphone location data tracking allows even more all-encompassing surveillance.

If authorities are willing to claim that Comey’s social media post is an emergency justifying warrantless real-time cellphone location tracking, it’s not hard to imagine that they could make a similar (bogus) claim about a suspected whistleblower or a journalist who reports critically on the administration. It wouldn’t be any more meritless than their claims that journalism is inciting crimes or threatening national security.

Concerningly, there’s very little constraint on the government if it decides to abuse the exigent circumstances exception to make emergency requests to cellphone providers for users’ location information. While courts can suppress evidence obtained through illegal searches, they can’t undo the illegal search itself, and officers and officials who abuse the Fourth Amendment face no personal repercussions.

Cellphone providers also seem unable to detect and refuse bogus emergency requests. The three major cellphone carriers — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — receive thousands or tens of thousands of emergency requests every year. While they require a certification of emergency from the government authority making the request, clearly that process isn’t foolproof if something like the Comey “emergency” can slip through the cracks.

That makes public scrutiny of real-time cellphone location tracking and the government’s reliance on the exigent circumstances exception all the more important. The Fourth Estate — and confidential sources like those who spoke to the Times — may be our most powerful remaining check on the surveillance state.