How a school district censored a local newspaper — and left a community in the dark
It’s been more than a month since New Jersey newspaper editor Charlie Kratovil published surveillance camera footage of a high schooler getting busted for bringing a BB gun to school — and just about as long since a county judge ordered him to take it down.
In late May, a judge used emergency powers to force Kratovil, the editor of New Brunswick Today, to remove the video from YouTube at the school board’s request. The order has set into motion a battle between education leaders who say the newspaper violated the student’s privacy and an editor who says the school administrators are silencing him to protect their public reputations.
“They got caught in a lie and their response is to litigate and waste taxpayer money trying to silence the press,” Kratovil said in an interview with Straight Arrow. Kratovil accused the district of upholding a “culture of secrecy,” with animosity toward journalists.
Press freedom advocates say the court order is a blatant First Amendment violation and part of a growing threat as judges increasingly use emergency orders to impose prior restraints, which prohibit journalists from publishing certain information.
It’s “a disturbing trend” in which courts silence stories — even newsworthy investigative reporting — ”before the journalist or the newspaper has a chance” to defend themselves, said Caitlin Vogus, the senior adviser for advocacy at the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation.
What makes Kratovil’s case particularly appalling, Vogus told Straight Arrow, is the speed at which the court moved to demand he delete the video from YouTube, and the length of time he has been silenced. Kratovil will get his day in court on Tuesday to defend himself and request the order be lifted. Until then, he’s barred from even describing the video’s contents in writing.
“An unconstitutional order freezing the newspaper’s right to speak has now been in place for more than a month and that’s very unusual,” Vogus said. “This should not be a hard case, I mean, the Supreme Court precedent is very clear here.”
Why did a judge silence New Brunswick Today?
Aubrey Johnson, the superintendent of New Brunswick Public Schools, a district of about 9,000 students an hour southwest of New York City, told Straight Arrow the district is “committed to public transparency.” But Johnson said the video’s publication violated the suspected student’s privacy and could compromise district security protocols “if it remained public.”
“The court stepped in to halt further display of the footage while these issues are being addressed,” Johnson said in a statement. “We’ll fully respect the court’s timeline and decisions as this process moves forward.”
The episode began in early May, when a New Brunswick High School student attempted to bring a BB gun onto campus. Court records also described the weapon as an airsoft weapon, both of which fire ball bearings that are highly unlikely to be fatal. A metal detector alerted the school’s security staff, who searched the 16-year-old student and took him into custody.
The school was placed into lockdown, which led Kratovil to question the severity of the threat and to accuse school leaders of misleading the public about potential harms to students. A magnet for free speech controversies, Kratovil said he obtained the school district security camera footage from a “confidential source.”
After he published the video on YouTube on May 28, Kratovil received a threatening letter from school board attorney George Hendricks. The lawyer claimed Kratovil’s decision to publish security camera footage violated state and federal children’s privacy laws and constituted a “security breach” that would “not be tolerated.”
Within 24 hours after the video went live online, Hendricks, Kratovil and his lawyer were called into a Zoom hearing with a judge. In an affidavit to the court on May 29, the district said it had reason to believe the footage was “recorded from a computer by an individual with access to the district’s surveillance system and disseminated without authorization.”
In its request that Kratovil be ordered to delete the video, the district cited a state law that prohibits juvenile courts and law enforcement from releasing records about children to the public and a federal privacy law that prohibits schools from disclosing information about students.
Neither law applies to journalists.
Middlesex County Judge Thomas Daniel McCloskey sided with the school district. McCloskey, who acknowledged he hadn’t watched the footage, ordered Kratovil to delete the surveillance footage from the internet — and barred him from writing about it.
Kratovil was never able to publish a news article about the video, he told Straight Arrow. Should the order get lifted, he said, he’ll be more motivated than ever to hit publish.
Did New Brunswick Today violate student privacy laws?
The May 29 emergency hearing became combative at times. Hendricks argued that he was trying to defend a student who police had arrested for bringing a weapon to campus.
An audio file of the hearing was posted on the New Brunswick Today YouTube page, even though Kratovil and the other participants told the judge they would refrain from recording.
“No one is allowed to videotape inside our schools, no one, except that’s our security camera system,” Hendricks said during the hearing. “That’s highly secure, but, I guess in this case, not.”
Hendricks claimed that New Brunswick Today had gained unauthorized access to the district’s confidential security system and posted footage of “this juvenile being arrested, handcuffed and taken away.”
“We’re the protectors of the children and under the federal FERPA law we have a duty to protect the privacy and security of our students,” Hendricks said. “That’s been breached here, I would submit, grossly.”
Hendricks cited the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal student privacy law that prohibits public schools from disseminating certain student records without parental consent. The rules don’t apply to “law enforcement records” — and they only apply to schools and companies working on their behalf.
Kratovil’s lawyer, Bruce Rosen, said the district’s request constituted an unconstitutional prior restraint and a misunderstanding of the federal student privacy law. The federal law places on public schools the burden of preventing sensitive student information from being released to the public.
“Your remedy is to go to the source,” of the leak, Rosen said during the hearing, “and not go to the journalist” who published a video in the public interest.
Did the court violate the First Amendment?
The court order has faced sharp criticism from First Amendment advocates, including the New Jersey Press Association.
“That kind of order, where a government agency uses the courts to stop a news organization from publishing news, is one of the most serious threats to the free press that exists,” the association said in a statement. “It lets those in power shape the story on their own terms, without scrutiny or challenge from reporters on the ground.”
Vogus, with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that while prior restraint issues are typically resolved in days, Kratovil’s case is a troubling outlier.
“This is an example of a court that rushed to judgement to enter a prior restraint and is now slow-walking reconsideration of what I think is an unconstitutional order,” she said.
But the case is part of a broader trend favoring censorship, Vogus said. She highlighted a recent case in Mississippi, where a newspaper was forced to remove an editorial critical of city officials, and an incident in Colorado where journalists were prohibited from reporting on the court proceedings in a murder case involving a teenager.
The Supreme Court has on several occasions held that the First Amendment allows journalists to publish truthful information that’s in the public’s interest to know. Because the district wasn’t “proactively transparent” about the lockdown, Kratovil said, parents had questions about what had actually transpired.
Perhaps most directly applicable is the 1979 case Smith v. Daily Mail, in which the Supreme Court struck down a West Virginia law that prohibited news outlets from publishing the names of juvenile offenders. The case centered on a decision by a local newspaper to publish the name and photograph of a student gunman who shot and killed a classmate at school.
Meanwhile, in the famous Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court overturned a prior restraint that prohibited The New York Times from publishing leaked government documents about the Vietnam War. In that case, Vogus said, the national security concerns cited by the government weren’t sufficient to justify censorship.
“We’re not talking about a case of national security here,” she said of the New Brunswick Today case. “We are talking about a matter that is extremely important to members of the public: a security incident at a school.”
Kratovil told Straight Arrow he’s confident the court order will ultimately be lifted and he hopes the school board will “think twice about doing this kind of thing in the future.”
Censoring him to keep details of the incident quiet, he said, had the opposite effect.
“It’s just a boneheaded thing to do — to initiate litigation to try to suppress this thing,” Kratovil said. “Because now, that draws more attention to it.”
Round out your reading
- Scientists are now eyeing a possible ‘Mega El Niño’.
- Critics mocked Mamdani’s AC request. Republicans made the same ask.
- Social Security was supposed to be a safety net. To young Americans, it’s a broken promise.
- What happens when the water dries up? Much of the American West is close to finding out.
- Political insiders are targeting the two-party system’s grip on America.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
