On Wednesday, a NewsNation reporter was arrested while covering a news conference in East Palestine, Ohio, about the train accident.
According to the news source, the East Palestine Police Department arrested reporter Evan Lambert after telling him to be quiet while Gov. Mike DeWine talked about the incident, which led to evacuations because of toxic chemicals.
Lambert was waiting for the conference to start at 3 p.m. local time, but it didn’t start until 5 p.m., which was the same time as his scheduled live shot, according to NewsNation. After his live report, he was arrested.
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The Columbiana County Jail told ABC News that Lambert, who was let out of jail later that night, is being charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Lambert told NewsNation in an interview that he didn’t expect to be arrested while doing his job. Lambert said after being released –
“I’m doing fine right now. It’s been an extremely long day.”
“No journalist expects to be arrested when you’re doing your job, and I think that’s really important that that doesn’t happen in our country.”
NewsNation’s Washington Bureau Chief Mike Viqueira said in a statement that –
“as you see from the videos, he was doing his job – what hundreds of journalists do without incident – reporting to the public on a matter of urgent, critical interest to our audience.”
Later, the governor said he was worried about the arrest and that stopping reporters from talking was wrong. DeWine said, as reported by The Washington Post –
“It has always been my practise that if I’m doing a press conference, someone wants to report out there and they want to be talking back to the people back on channel, whatever, they have every right to do that.”
According to the news source, DeWine also said that he did not ask for the arrest and would not want it to happen again. He added –
“If someone was stopped from doing that, or told they could not do that, that was wrong. It was nothing that I authorised.”
ABC News says that DeWine’s press conference was about the derailment of a train, which forced nearly half of East Palestine’s 5,000 people to leave their homes.
Officials said on Wednesday that people could go back to their homes because air samples showed that there were no dangerous levels of pollutants in the area.
