Journalism under attack

 When the Justice Department charged Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, and the reporter Georgia Fort and photographer Junn Bollmann with a pair of crimes that carry, in total, the possibility of 10 years or more in prison, something shifted in President Trump’s legal campaign against journalists.

While Mr. Trump has tried for decades to keep the press in line using civil lawsuits, federal criminal law is a sharper weapon. This time the law may also be on the president’s side, reported The New York Times.

The prosecution of Mr. Lemon and the others arose amid the turmoil in Minnesota following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this year. On Jan. 18, a group of demonstrators entered and disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, where a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement official served as a pastor. In addition to the three journalists, dozens of protesters are charged with conspiring to violate the rights of the parishioners to religious freedom.

Mr. Lemon has a show on YouTube, and Ms. Fort and Mr. Bollmann are independent journalists. Their defense is clear. “I was there as a journalist, not a protester,” Mr. Lemon told me. “I was interviewing people from all sides. We were livestreaming. It’s all right there on tape.”

The product of journalism, for decades, has enjoyed substantial protection under the First Amendment. The courts almost never uphold prior restraints on publication or distribution of news. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions like New York Times v. Sullivan, it’s difficult for public figures who feel wronged by journalists to recover damages for libel. The courts protect journalistic outlets from potentially ruinous judgments because, in the words of that famous case from 1964, of the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

But federal law, including the crimes for which Mr. Lemon and the other two are charged, offers no similar protections for the process of journalism. In 1972, the Supreme Court rejected a claim that the First Amendment entitled a journalist to refuse to comply with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury and be asked to identify confidential sources. In that case, Branzburg v. Hayes, the justices upheld the “obligation of reporters to respond to grand jury subpoenas as other citizens do and to answer questions relevant to an investigation into the commission of crime.”

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