Electronic and print news outlets have joined with Fix the Court to ask James Duff, director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and the executives running the 13 federal circuits to ensure there is live, unfettered public access to any court hearing and judges' ruling related to the election.

That stems from technical issues with the Texas court decision Monday (Nov. 2) rejecting a Trump campaign attempt to invalidate drive-in-dropbox ballots. The phone line set up to provide access to that hearing malfunctioned and dropped everyone, said the outlets in a letter to Duff Tuesday (Nov. 3), after which only some outlets were allowed to get back on, and even then the audio quality was so bad, compounded by the fact that the reporters' lines were not muted, that it made it "almost impossible to understand."

They offered some suggestions to avoid a repeat of those issues for the existing and expected legal challenges surrounding the election. "There are dozens of election lawsuits making their way through district and appeals courts at this very moment, and the American people have a keen interest in how these cases are being argued and how they are being decided," they told Duff.

1. Allow district courts to use YouTube channels, which most circuits have created for audio appeals during the pandemic.

2. Work with the local media outlets to create a pool feed of the arguments.

3. Tweet, send a press release, and or post on the court home page if there are delays and technical issues

Joining in the letter were the Radio Television Digital News Association, the National Press Photographers Association, the News Media Alliance, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has called on Minnesota officials to stop the series of protest coverage-related attacks on credentialed journalists. 

In a June 2 letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and head of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, the committee, whose members include virtually all the major news outlets and their association's, said police have "arrested, detained, threatened and physically assaulted journalists with rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, batons, and fists." 

Related: Committee to Protect Journalists Calls for Media Safety 

It said in all cases there were "strong indications" that the police knew they were members of the press.  

"The right of the press to document police activity is foundational to our democracy and has long been recognized and protected by the courts," they wrote. 

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz apologized for the arrest of a CNN news crew. The committee acknowledged the apology and said interactions between police and journalists had improved, but said even one arrest or assault when law enforcement know it is a journalist is a profound violation of the First Amendment. 

And there was more than one. The committee cited a TV reporter pepper sprayed and a freelance journalist who lost an eye to a rubber bullet while "clearly in the act of photographing police," as well as the that on-camera arrest of CNN's Omar Jimenez, and crew, plus more that a dozen other incidents it said it has documented. 

The committee asked the governor to instruct officers that the news media are exempt from curfews and sought other assurances to: 

• "Instruct your officers and staff that the arrest or physical attack of a journalist who is compliant with reasonable police orders is a clearly established First Amendment violation; 

• "Take swift action to discipline any officer who is found to have arrested or assaulted a journalist engaged in newsgathering; 

• "Inform your officers that they themselves could be subject to legal liability for violating these rights; 

• "Ensure that crowd control tactics are appropriate and proportional, and are designed to prevent collateral harm to journalists covering the protests; 

• "Continue to exempt members of the news media from mobility restrictions, including, and especially, curfews; and 

• "Release all information about arrests of or physical interactions with the press to the public to allow it to evaluate the legitimacy of police conduct." 

President Donald Trump has long attacked journalists as fake or politically motivated or dangerous enemies of the people, leading to his being branded, as a presidential candidate, by the Committee to Protect Journalists as a threat to press freedom "unknown in modern history."