Judge Orders Newspaper to Censor Video, Silence Editor Despite Admitting He Never Watched the Video Himself

(Reclaim The Net)—There is a particular kind of American who believes, somewhere deep in the region of the ribs, that censorship is a thing that happens elsewhere. Under other flags. To other people, the ones stuck with the shakier constitutions.

And then one ordinary morning he finds himself in Middlesex County, New Jersey, reading about a judge who has ordered a newspaper to delete a video, forbidden its editor from describing what the video shows, and handed down all of these commands without once bothering to press play.

That is roughly where Charlie Kratovil has been living for the past month, and the remarkable thing is how little has moved.

On July 7, Superior Court Judge Thomas Daniel McCloskey again declined to lift the order forcing New Brunswick Today to scrub school surveillance footage from its website and its YouTube channel.

He would rule, he said, “within a day or two.” It is the kind of sentence you suspect he has said before. The censorship, in the meantime, stays precisely where it is.

You will want to know what this menace to the public consists of. The footage shows a 16-year-old walking into New Brunswick High School, setting off a metal detector, and being surrounded by security officers who relieve him of what appears to be a BB gun.

Kratovil published it on May 28, having obtained it from a confidential source, and the board of education sued him the following day, which tells you something about how the board of education likes to spend its mornings.

By May 29, which is quick work by any standard, McCloskey had ordered the video deleted, barred Kratovil from writing about the incident, and prohibited him from so much as describing what the footage contained. He did all of it, he admitted, without having watched it. There is a certain confidence required to censor a thing sight unseen, and the judge, to his credit, possessed it in full.

Now, there is a name for a government body reaching into a newsroom and stopping the press before the public gets a look. It is called a prior restraint, and the Supreme Court has long regarded it as the heaviest hand the state can lay on the First Amendment, permissible only in the rarest of cases.

Kratovil’s lawyers made this point with the weary patience of people explaining something that really ought not to require explaining. “The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly made it clear that prior restraints are the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,” they wrote, adding that “ordering content to be removed from the internet and enjoining future publications are unequivocally prior restraints that must be analyzed under the prior restraint doctrine, which this Court ignored.”

The district has decided this is a story about student privacy. The trouble is that the statutes in question govern how a school handles its own records; they have exactly nothing to say about what a newspaper may print, and neither of the two laws the board cited applies to journalists in the first place.

This is a gap you could drive a school bus through, and board attorney Robert Mahoney attempted to fill it with one of the more inventive sentences ever offered in defense of deleting journalism. “The board is not acting as an editor, Your Honor, the law acts as an editor,” he said, arguing that state and federal rules “make it absolutely clear that student records are confidential.”

He warned that “people could do great harm” with the security details visible in the video. One pictures the nation’s criminal masterminds huddled over the footage, at last unlocking the ancient secret of the walk-through metal detector.

But there is a reason this particular video, and no other, had to disappear. When the lockdown happened, the district told parents it was running a “security drill,” and somehow forgot to mention that a student had been arrested for bringing a weapon onto campus. The footage declines to cooperate with this version of events. Kratovil’s lawyer Bruce Rosen put it plainly. “This involves the credibility of the board,” Rosen said. “The first thing they did was they lied, they claimed that it was a routine drill.”

Kratovil sees the lawsuit as simply more of the same. “We have a problem in our school system with bullying and unfortunately it starts at the top,” he said after Tuesday’s hearing. “The board of education is continuing to bully New Brunswick Today and trying to force us to participate in their cover-up.”

There is one more thing the district would very much like to know, which is how Kratovil got the tape at all. Superintendent Aubrey Johnson wrote in an affidavit that “the district has reason to believe that the footage was recorded from a computer by an individual with access to the district’s surveillance system and disseminated without authorization.”

New Jersey’s shield law exists precisely so that reporters cannot be marched into court and made to burn their sources, and Kratovil has declined, politely and firmly, to say where the video came from.

The rest reads like a map of closing doors. Kratovil’s attorneys asked the Appellate Division to intervene on June 5 and were turned away on a technicality. They filed a motion to dissolve the restraints with the trial court on June 10, then ran emergency motions past both the Appellate Division and the New Jersey Supreme Court when McCloskey was in no hurry to hear them. One after another, the doors shut. And the video has stayed offline the entire time, which is the entire point of an order like this one.

Silence a story long enough and the moment simply passes, ruling or no ruling. So here we are. The footage remains censored. The gag on Kratovil holds. And a judge who has still never watched the video gets to decide whether the rest of us ever will.