New Jersey Judge Orders All U.S. Journalists to Get Court Approval Before Publishing School Lockdown Video

New Jersey Judge Orders All U.S. Journalists to Get Court Approval Before Publishing School Lockdown Video

A New Jersey judge just told every journalist in America what they can and can't publish. Not just the one newspaper that annoyed him. Everyone.

On May 8, a 16-year-old student walked into New Brunswick High School with an airsoft BB gun in his waistband. Metal detectors caught it. Security pulled the toy gun, the school went into lockdown as a precaution, and everybody went home safe.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, New Brunswick Today, a local outlet run by resident and mayoral candidate Charlie Kratovil, got hold of internal security camera footage of the encounter from a confidential source and posted it to YouTube on May 28. The New Brunswick Board of Education sued the next day.

The First Order Was Bad. The Second One Is Worse in a New Way.

Superior Court Judge Thomas D. McCloskey issued a temporary restraining order on June 9 requiring New Brunswick Today to yank the video, banning any future posting of school security footage, and barring the outlet from even writing about what was in it.

That's a prior restraint. Government stops speech before it happens rather than punishing it after. The U.S. Supreme Court has said for decades that prior restraints carry, as the Freedom of the Press Foundation put it, "a heavy presumption against their constitutional validity." They're supposed to be nearly impossible to get.

New Brunswick Today asked McCloskey to rescind the order. On July 9, he issued a revised 59-page ruling. He lifted the outright ban on describing the video's contents and said the outlet could publish it, as long as it blurs or redacts the identities of the juveniles shown, and as long as it submits the redacted footage to the school board's lawyers and the court for approval before posting it, according to jerseyvindicator.

So the outlet still needs a judge's sign-off before it publishes. That's still a prior restraint. But McCloskey didn't stop there.

He Extended It to Every Reporter in the Country

The July 9 order doesn't just bind New Brunswick Today. It applies to "the press" generally, according to both jerseyvindicator and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Any news organization anywhere in the United States that wants to publish this video now has to redact juvenile identities and, per the order's language, submit the modified footage for review before it runs.

Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser for advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, didn't mince words: "Forcing news outlets to delete or withhold information and to submit their work for government approval before they can publish is censorship, full stop." She added that "judges aren't kings" and have no authority to bind journalists who were never in the courtroom and are not parties to the case.

Courts issue orders that bind the parties in front of them. McCloskey's order tries to reach out and grab reporters at, say, the New York Times or a random Substack writer in Ohio who had nothing to do with this lawsuit and were never given a chance to argue against it.

The School District's Side of This Deserves a Fair Hearing

The Board of Education isn't wrong to worry about student privacy or school security procedures leaking to the public. Security camera footage of minors, especially footage involving a weapon scare at a high school, touches real privacy interests protected under state and federal law. A district that wants to keep surveillance systems and layouts out of public view has a legitimate security argument too. Those aren't fake concerns, and a reasonable school administrator would want assurances that a 16-year-old's face and name aren't broadcast to millions of YouTube viewers.

But privacy concerns get addressed through targeted remedies, like redaction requirements enforced through ordinary defamation or privacy lawsuits after publication, not through a standing government veto over what the press can print before it prints it. McCloskey's own order concedes the video "was already published and in the public domain" when he issued his ruling, yet he still required advance court and school-board sign-off before republication. Prior restraint doctrine would reject this approach.

What Happens Next

No appeal has been filed as of this writing. The Freedom of the Press Foundation said in its statement that "similar orders have been overturned across the country" and predicted this one should be too if New Brunswick Today appeals and "higher courts faithfully apply the law."

Until that happens, there's a standing New Jersey court order on the books that claims authority over every news outlet in the country, whether or not they've ever heard of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Whether any outlet outside the original case decides to test that claim by publishing the unredacted footage anyway, and whether McCloskey or an appeals court would actually try to enforce it against them, remains an open question no court has answered yet.