The blurring line between journalism and activism is being used as a cudgel

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Peter W. Klein is a professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing and Media, and founding director of the Global Reporting Centre.

The line between journalism and activism is on trial on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, with far-reaching consequences for who gets to enjoy constitutionally protected press freedom.

In the U.S., former CNN anchor Don Lemon is facing federal criminal charges of interfering with religious freedom stemming from his coverage of a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn. – a congregation whose pastor simultaneously served as a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement field director. Mr. Lemon was livestreaming the protest inside the church.

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Three thousand kilometres away, the British Columbia Supreme Court is hearing a civil case involving photojournalist Amber Bracken, arrested while on assignment for the environmental news site The Narwhal, covering a standoff between the RCMP and Indigenous land defenders. The protesters were barricaded inside a small structure on a service road, blocking construction of a natural gas pipeline on traditional Wet’suwet’en territory. When the RCMP forced its way in, officers arrested the occupants, claiming they had violated a court injunction obtained by Coastal GasLink. They held Ms. Bracken for four days, despite her being a credentialed journalist whose organization had alerted police command to her presence days before the raid. The Narwhal is now suing the RCMP for violations of her Charter rights.

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Both cases turn on the blurring line between activism and reporting, which the journalists and their defenders claim police have used to undermine press freedom.

The Bracken case comes down, in part, to who gets to decide who is a journalist. RCMP Assistant Commissioner John Brewer‘s testimony brought the issue into focus when he joked about his early days on the force: “Every media person had a fedora and a press tag sticking out of it, you knew who they were. I don’t know any more.” Ms. Bracken did have a press pass, along with two professional cameras – yet the government’s lawyers argued that by positioning herself inside the tiny house alongside the people she was photographing, she had become a participant, rather than a witness.

But this is how embedding works. When Ms. Bracken covered the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 – work that won her the prestigious World Press Photo award – she was also physically present among the people resisting the pipeline. That proximity wasn’t incidental to the journalism; it was the journalism. The same applied to Mr. Lemon in Minnesota. There is no way to capture the texture of a protest from a parking lot across the street.

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When I was coming up as a reporter in the early 1990s, we talked about journalists going to the “dark side” – public relations, government, NGO work. Today, those lines are permeable. As a journalism professor, I’ve watched a generational shift: more students arrive without a clear sense of where reporting ends and advocacy begins, and some have no interest in drawing that line. After the Parkland school shooting, survivor Rebecca Schneid, the co-editor of the school newspaper, declared on CNN that “journalism is a form of activism.” Critics accused her of misunderstanding objectivity, but her defenders pointed out that surviving an attack that killed more than a dozen schoolmates makes objectivity an abstraction.

That tension matters especially when covering communities that have been historically misrepresented. Duncan McCue, whose textbook Decolonizing Journalism is now standard in journalism schools, argues that reporters entering Indigenous communities carry the weight of a long history of extractive storytelling, what he calls “story-taking.” His guiding principle: “no stories about us without us.” By that standard, Ms. Bracken’s approach – building trust, being present, bearing witness from inside – isn’t a departure from journalistic best practice, but a fulfillment of it.

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None of this means there are no limits. The question is where those limits are, and who gets to decide.

For the Trump administration, the answer seems to be that they do. The Justice Department bypassed the courts by empaneling a grand jury, which returned an indictment. FBI agents then made a spectacle of his arrest, which the White House marked on social media with “When life gives you lemons …” followed by a chain emoji. The message was unmistakable: In the hands of authorities, the perceived blur between journalism and activism was a cudgel.

That weapon is being sharpened in Vancouver too. The Bracken trial will determine whether Canadian courts give the RCMP the authority to decide who counts as press. If the answer is yes, the fedora test will be back – and any journalist who gets too close to the people they cover may do so at their legal peril.