The majority opinion, authored by Judge Edith Jones, appointed by former President Ronald Regan, finds that local officials were reasonable when they used an obscure Texas law to arrest Gordiloca and thereby criminalize a wide range of what has been considered basic accountability journalism. The ruling applies in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
“Any law enforcement agency basically has a green light right now to go out and arrest and threaten or detain journalists who publish documents that are leaked from the government,” said attorney Daxton “Chip” Stewart, a media law professor at Texas Christian University, in an interview about the ruling. “And … if that journalist spends a night in jail, they don’t have a remedy and can’t sue for a civil rights violation.”
The court sidestepped addressing the Texas law’s constitutionality, and Jones couched her findings on whether Laredo officials knowingly violated Villarreal’s civil rights when they arrested her in 2017.
If the Supreme Court allows this to stand, freedom of the press would instantly become nonexistent. That is not hyperbole. The court would be essentially telling the press that they are only allowed to share what the government has decided they could share, and attempting to report anything else would leave them open to criminal prosecution and no legal recourse against law enforcement and government overreach.
Even if no explicit threat is made, would you, as a journalist, be willing to put your career, your freedom, and your family security on the line to report something that didn’t come from official government sources? Would you want to report on something regarding a government official who could literally decide whether you remain a free person? Would you literally want to take on even a state government on your own? Because that is what every journalist would have to decide any time they report on something that didn’t come from an official government source. Anything else would subject them to retribution from government officials who would use the fact that they got the information from an informant during dinner at Applebees rather than the corrupt officials they were investigating in the first place as evidence of a crime.
And even under the “current” rules regarding this ruling as it stands, what is to stop Texas (or any of the other affected states) from having someone like Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper arrested for reporting on something on CNN or MSNBC? What would stop a future President Trump from using this ruling as justification for the dismantling of the press that he has already promised he would try to do?
And what I’m afraid of is that one of the basic foundations of our country – freedom of the press – is now in the hands of six people who have already gone on record saying they want to dismantle the basic foundations of our country. Pardon me if that makes me just a wee bit nervous.
I sure do wish more people had seen this coming from a mile away in 2016 but here we are.
Edit to add some more context from the article
That’s both horrifying and unsurprising. Unfortunately I think the voting public will have to experience authoritarianism to be motivated enough to do anything about it. And by then it likely will be too late.