Media protected but health care workers potentially not in Jason Pierre-Paul medical records case, says expert in First Amendment, law

LAWRENCE — Jonathan Peters, assistant professor of journalism and faculty affiliate at the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center at the University of Kansas, can speak with media about the controversy surrounding a fellow media member’s tweeting of NFL player Jason Pierre-Paul’s medical record. The New York Giants star injured his hand in a fireworks-related incident on the Fourth of July. An ESPN reporter Wednesday tweeted a picture of his medical record indicating that he had a finger amputated as a result of the incident.

Federal and state authorities who oversee the protection of private medical information are monitoring the case to determine if any laws regarding medical privacy were breached. The case has also raised First Amendment questions regarding whether a reporter should have shared private medical data.

“This may seem strange, but the First Amendment would protect ESPN and its reporter in this case, as long as they were just passive recipients of the medical records,” Peters said. “The person who leaked the records, presumably a hospital employee, is a different story—he or she could be in HIPPA trouble.”

Peters can discuss these and related issues.

A First Amendment expert, Peters is an attorney and the press freedom correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review. He has blogged about free expression for the Harvard Law & Policy Review and has written on legal issues for Esquire, The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, Wired and PBS. He is the First Amendment chair of the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights Litigation Committee and the teaching chair of the Law and Policy Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

To schedule an interview, contact Mike Krings at 785-864-8860 or mkrings@ku.edu.