Laura Belin, one of Iowa’s leading political journalists, filed a federal lawsuit on Friday after being denied press credentials by the Iowa House of Representatives for the sixth year in a row.
“Refusing to credential journalists for arbitrary reasons — or because lawmakers may not like tough coverage or her point of view — is censorship, period,” attorney Courtney Corbello said in a news release about the lawsuit. “We’re asking the court to put an end to this serious violation of Laura Belin’s First Amendment rights.”
Corbello is an attorney with the Washington D.C.-based Institute for Free Speech (IFS), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that is representing Belin in the lawsuit.
Belin has covered the state legislature since 2007, publishing her work mostly at her news site, Bleeding Heartland. In 2019, she applied to the Iowa House of Representatives for press credentials to cover that year’s session. It was the first time Belin had sought credentials and granting them should have been a routine matter, but then-clerk of the House Carmine Boal rejected Belin’s request.
Boal claimed Belin isn’t actually a journalist, and “press credentials are not issued to members of the public.”
The rejection made national news, because it appeared obvious that the Republican-controlled House was denying Belin’s request because she is open about her liberal political orientation. PEN America, which supports press freedom, issued a statement at the time, saying “any content-based limitations on journalists’ ability to report on government business would be an affront to press freedoms.”
In its statement, PEN America noted that the “general lack of transparency around the House’s process for approving press credentials creates space for unfounded restrictions of journalist access.”
Belin has applied for Iowa House press credentials every year since 2019, and been rejected each time, even though she has also been the statehouse reporter for KHOI Community Radio in Ames since 2021.
Boals retired at the end of the 2019 legislative session, and her successor as chief clerk, Meghan Nelson, has denied Belin’s applications for “being ‘nontraditional’ media, and, now, denied without any explanation,” according to the IFS.
“To this day, I have never received an explanation from Nelson or anyone on her behalf as to how I do not meet the press credential policy,” Belin said in the IFS news release. “Because of how the House Chief Clerk has applied her credentialing policy, I am unable to cover legislative proceedings on equal footing with my peers in the statehouse press corps.”
In its filing in federal district court in Des Moines, IFS argues “the House’s denial of Belin’s credentials is an unconstitutional attempt to play favorites and punish dissent. By manipulating the credentialing process to exclude certain reporters, the House has violated her constitutional rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
IFS further argues that the problem is bigger than just the House’s refusal to credential Belin: “As implemented, the credential policy itself also unconstitutionally gives Nelson unbridled discretion to deny First Amendment rights.”
This is not the first time Belin has been involved in a lawsuit over state government actions.
In December 2021, Belin, along with Clark Kauffmann of Iowa Capital Dispatch and Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, sued Gov. Kim Reynolds alleging the governor’s office was not complying with the state’s Open Records Act.
Belin had requested records related to a video message the governor may have recorded for meatpacking plants early in the pandemic, communications the governor received encouraging her to sign or veto certain legislation and records related to the use of the governor’s mansion for private fundraising events. Kaufmann also requested records about the use of the governor’s mansion for a fundraiser, one that benefited Des Moines Christian School, as well as records related to the overpayment and subsequent firing of the director of the Iowa Veterans Home. Evans has been seeking records about the use of taxpayer dollars to send members of the Iowa State Patrol to the Texas/Mexico border over the summer, in what appeared to be a political stunt.
The governor’s office eventually responded to the request, and attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed. In April 2023, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected the governor’s request for dismissal.
