(The Center Square)—A Chicago-area broadcaster and the company she works for have filed a lawsuit against Gov. J.B. Pritzker in federal court over he exclusion from news briefings after the reporter spoke at a protest in Chicago in May.
Salem Media and AM 560 broadcaster Amy Jacobson filed a lawsuit against the governor in federal court on Monday.
“Attorneys also are asking the court to take immediate action to allow Jacobson back into the press briefings,” said Liberty Justice Center, the nonprofit organization that is representing Salem Media in the lawsuit.
Last month, attorneys representing Salem and Jacobson said Jacobson “broke the story that Pritzker’s family had traveled to their equestrian estate in Wisconsin amid Illinois’ stay-at-home order – weeks after it was reported that his family was at another estate in Florida.”
“The news raised questions about why the stay-at-home order did not apply to the governor’s family,” the statement said.
Last month, the governor defended the decision to bar Jacobson from news briefings after she attended and spoke at a rally in Chicago focused on reopening Illinois.
“Look, when you’re standing up at a rally, where people are taking a political position, holding up Nazi swastikas, holding up pictures of Hitler and taking an extreme position as she did, it strikes me that that’s not objective in any way,” Pritzker said. “It’s not the way you act, it’s not the way that your colleagues in the media act, who are reporters.”
Jacobson denounced two racist signs on Twitter that she saw at the rally.
“That is not a reporter,” the governor said. “She represents a talk show that has a particular point of view, we allowed her to ask questions because once upon a time she was a reporter, but she proved that she is no longer a reporter.”
The president of the Liberty Justice Center said the governor can’t pick reporters based on their coverage.
“What the governor appears to not understand is that Americans have a right to hold their elected officials accountable, and one of the ways they do this is through a vibrant, free press,” he said. “It’s not up to Gov. Pritzker to pick and choose which reporters can cover him based on how much he agrees with their coverage or their points of view.
“And keeping reporters out of the room because he disagrees with their line of questioning or point of view is a gross violation of the First Amendment,” he said.