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Comment by KevinEldon | Hacker News Reader

Are journalists immune from laws? Which laws? What constitutes a journalist? These are the kinds of questions that courts sort out. Goodman isn't in jail. She now has a legal and public platform to defend her actions and position as a journalist. If you're doing journalism that is as aggressive and brave as the article suggests this is then you'd expect to get pushback. Thankfully we have laws, the First Amendment, and public courts so Amy Goodman wasn't just whisked away to serve her time in jail.

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I think that attitude is willfully naive. Nobody likes having to go to court, it often costs thousands of dollars in legal fees if you don't want to take a risk. The "Send them to court and they'll be vindicated if they're right" attitude doesn't excuse using selective or vindictive law enforcement. Do you think they're going to send every single protester to court, or just the one who got millions of views?

Also without any transparency into randomness of how judges and jurors are picked, and a absurdly large number of laws, there's definitely major room for bending the law to one's will.

One example of this, though not the worst abuse, is OJ's 2008 prosecution where he got 9-33 years, and his accomplice who brought the gun got probation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson_robbery_case

"She now has a legal and public platform to defend her actions and position as a journalist."

That's the point - she shouldn't need to defend her actions and position as a journalist, certainly not to a court. That's the point of press freedom.

Press freedom covers what is printed. It does not cover what is required to generate what is printed. A reporter who sells heroin to gather info for a story could still rightfully be brought up on drugs charges.

> Are journalists immune from laws? Which laws? What constitutes a journalist? These are the kinds of questions that courts sort out.

You state this as if it needs to be done. It's settled law. The state is clearly overreaching.

Journalistic freedoms shouldn't have to be retried just because some large corporation is irked.

I really have no idea how this all works in terms of what's allowable as a journalist, and what we merely let them get away with to avoid bad PR.

That said, it feels like the trespass charge could be successfully prosecuted (if not for the difficulties in proving that were mentioned in the article), but riot? To call a journalist a protestor merely for being there? That seems like a HUGE stretch.

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