Club member helps with reporter's effort to challenge agency gag rules

National Press Club member Kathryn Foxhall was recently a panelist on a webinar discussion about a lawsuit filed this summer by an investigative journalist in Pennsylvania against the Allegheny County Jail, seeking access to information about the public agency that has been specifically denied to journalists.

The jail in Pennsylvania has policies prohibiting staff and contractors from speaking to the media or others about the jail without approval from higher-ups.

Journalist Brittany Hailer, who has been investigating the high death rate inside the facility, also was on the panel. Her lawsuit is believed to be a first for a journalist, suing a public agency to eliminate these policies.

Foxhall says this suit could pave the way for other journalists to insist on the same openness in other public agencies.

She is passing along the YouTube link for the Oct. 19 panel discussion -- “Fighting Gag Rules on Government Employees” -- so Club members can learn more about the issue.

Hailer is director of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, whose work is funded in part by The Pulitzer Center.

She is represented by the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Foxhall's work over the past decade in bringing attention to these types of policies in all levels of government, national and local, caught the attention of Yale Law, and she is credited with helping make the lawsuit come about.

The suit says, “The Gag Rules prevent reporting that is urgently needed to inform the public about conditions and events at the Jail and unconstitutionally impede news coverage of the Jail needed for meaningful public oversight and accountability.”

Frank LoMonte, a First Amendment attorney who has done extensive analysis on gag rules, also spoke on the panel. He is now newsroom legal counsel to CNN in Atlanta after years heading up the Student Press Law Center in Washington.

For more information on the suit, here is a press release from the Society of Professional Journalists.