News Reporters Participating in Protests and the First Amendment

News Reporters Participating in Protests and the First Amendment: 

Robert Phillips, Deputy District Attorney (Ret). 

Question:  If a news reporter for a properly credentialed news agency, while reporting on a public protest or civil demonstration, steps out of his shoes as a reporter and engages individual protestors with whom the reporter may personally disagree in a debate, thus becoming part of the problem by potentially agitating an already tense situation, is he still protected by the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press ”  I.e.; does the First Amendment shield him from arrest?  Or, looking at the other side of this same coin, does a police officer incur any civil liability when he attempts to enforce a city’s policy of separating opposing protestors into separate demonstration areas, and then arrests (or threatens to arrest) a news reporter who ventures into one demonstration area or the other, debating the protestors with whom the reporter may disagree

This was the question asked in the ....