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Notes -
There is a trope of journalists standing in front of some perfectly innocent-looking building reporting on some Breaking News while the news is happening somewhere within that building. They generally do that because they are not allowed to enter the building and get footage of the event itself.
If Lemon had been reporting from the street outside the church, reasonable people would not blame him for anything, even if he had been tipped off by anti-ICE rioters.
Entering together with the rioters makes him look like what is called an "embedded journalist". While I am sure that embedded journalists will claim that they are actually totally neutral and independent an in no way beholden to the party in whose unit they are embedded and who sponsored their kevlar west (and whose PR people possibly get to sign of any publications they might write), I am equally sure that their opponent will not be very inclined to buy that if they are captured and instead treat them as PoWs.
Lemon being a TV person, I presume that he was recording video from within the church. Here in old Europe, we believe that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now that is not an absolute thing, if your worship involves sacrificing kids to the Outer Gods, then there would be a public interest a journalist fulfills in violating your privacy of worship.
Frankly, I fail to see any public interest for life video coverage here. If schoolchild A is bullying schoolchild B, and then schoolchild C pulls out their mobile and openly lifestreams that to the internet, I am much more inclined to call C a bully than a journalist. I do not need to see the footage to know that some of the anti-ICE protesters are total assholes, a textual summary of what happened suffices for that. There is no Pulitzer to be won here.
So I am fine with letting the jury figure out if he was intentionally violating civil rights or not.
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