An ‘extremely disturbing’ decision

Katie Baker, a 10-month veteran reporter of TV station KUTV, proceeded to film an interview outside the courthouse in Southern Utah’s Washington County with a woman who had not yet been dismissed from the jury pool. The station aired her interview on Sept. 10, the second day of jury selection.

The interviewee made comments critical of the defendant. Ms. Baker now says, “I believed that Ms. Webb almost surely would be dismissed as a juror. Consequently I believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that it was proper to interview Ms. Webb.”

The reporter’s attorney says she didn’t know about the judge’s order. “It was a mistake.”

The judge held a hearing and accepted Ms. Baker’s explanation, but decided to punish her by requiring her to produce a public-service story. Should she fail to complete the assignment and provide the court with a DVD within 90 days, she will be found in contempt, explains her attorney, Jeff Hunt.

That means she could be jailed.

“It does bother me a little bit that he would order a reporter to do a story,” Mr. Hunt says.

Now there’s an understatement.

Floyd Abrams, an attorney and First Amendment expert, calls the judge’s little homework assignment nothing short of extraordinary.

“The notion that a judge can either compel a journalist to write a story, or sit in judgment on a story to determine if it sufficiently serves the public interest, is extremely disturbing,” Mr. Abrams told The Associated Press in an interview from New York. “It puts the judge in the classic role of censor. The judge is deciding whether the story is worthy or not — not even if it’s true, but whether it’s worthy.”

Indeed, it’s tempting to recommend Ms. Baker perform the “public service” of filming a documentary on the way judges overreach their authority in modern America.

But this matter shouldn’t get that far. Judge Shumate here shows an almost childlike innocence about who owns the television equipment Ms. Baker would presumably have to use to do her “punishment assignment,” as well as who would suffer the financial harm if he means her station must give up paid advertising time to air her little “Be sure to eat your spinach” opus. (A written version of his ruling, which might clarify such matters, was still being prepared last week.)

As Mr. Abrams properly notes, this crosses the line from the merely goofy to the dangerously precedent-setting.

Prior restraint of the news media — things such as requiring the creation of ginned-up, fake “news stories” that meet the court’s definition of “public service” — violates the First Amendment’s freedom of the press. Judges should no more be ordering reporters to prepare (let alone air) propagandized swill designed to please their amorphous ideas of “public service” — on pain of imprisonment — than they should punish offending doctors by instructing them to perform on their unwary patients some variety of surgery that happens to suit the court’s current whims.