- Ref # CAB00109
- January 26, 2022
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 recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal decision of Saved Magazine v. Spokane Police Department (Dec. 9, 2021) __ F.4th __ [2021 U.S.App. LEXIS 36304].
Looking at the available precedent, the Ninth Circuit noted the lack of any prior case authority that might establish a rule, pro or con, settling the issue as to whether the Spokane Police Department was violating any First Amendment-related law, or that the officer involved acted unreasonably in “examin(ing) the substance of (the news reporter’s) speech in order to enforce the separate protest zone policy.” The general rule is that a court cannot impose civil liability upon any party to a lawsuit absent “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” By .... © 2026 Legal Updates, LLC.
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