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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Courts - "Taking Aim at Student Muckrakers"
Updating this ILB entry from Oct. 25, 2009, headed "Lake County Illinois prosecutors 'Turn Tables on Student Journalists'" (and the odd tack it took in this Nov. 12th entry), David Carr of the NY Times devotes his "The Media Equation" column today to the story. Some quotes:
Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.In one of the most recent cases, students working with the effort, which became the Medill Innocence Project in 1999, uncovered evidence that suggested Anthony McKinney had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for almost three decades for the murder of a security guard in 1978. * * *
And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors.
“I and some of my former classmates are now wondering if we are going to have to consider going to jail to protect our sources and our notes,” said Evan S. Benn, a writer and editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who worked on the case in his final semester at Medill before graduating in 2004.
The prosecutors are seeking access to investigative materials, e-mail messages, course outlines, syllabuses, training materials and, yes, even grades, to explore the “bias, motive and interest” behind the students’ work.
The prosecution argued in a brief filed last week that the school “conducted a private criminal investigation by using students in a journalism class” and further said that during their three years of work on the case, the students had paid witnesses money, flirted with them and, in one instance, flashed a shotgun.
Because the students did not produce newspaper articles themselves — some of their findings were published by the reporter Maurice Possley in a front-page piece in The Chicago Sun-Times last year — the prosecution holds that the students themselves are not journalists and not eligible for the reporter’s privilege of protecting their work. * * *
As some corners of journalism weaken under eroding business models, subjects of coverage seem increasingly emboldened to push back against aggressive reporting. At a time when all manner of hybrid models of journalism are emerging, the effort by Anita Alvarez, the Cook County state’s attorney, to deny the students status as journalists in the eyes of the court is ominous.
Newspapers are beginning to collaborate with schools in an effort to stretch thin budgets, journalism nonprofit groups that don’t have specific publications but share their findings are cropping up all over the map, and citizen journalists are beginning to use the Web to provide accountability reporting as well. * * *
After her election in November as Cook County state’s attorney, Ms. Alvarez challenged the new evidence in the McKinney case and issued a sweeping subpoena ordering Professor Protess to hand over all of the material from the project’s investigation, including students’ private memos and grades.
Her office said that the grades were germane because they might suggest a motive for the students’ work. The school’s lawyers will have until Jan. 11 to respond to the prosecutors’ argument that its students were not acting as journalists. At issue will be who is actually a journalist and, not so incidentally, what remains of one man’s life.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 17, 2009 10:00 AM
Posted to Courts in general