Both protesters at the University of Missouri and ESPN freelance photographer Tim Tai made a lot of mistakes in a widely discussed confrontation caught on video. The clip shows him approaching a group of Mizzou students celebrating the firing of Mizzou President Tim Wolfe after an emotionally charged week of protests in which students of color relived their experiences of racial discrimination on campus. After a protest representative asks Tai to leave, he refuses, saying he’s a reporter doing his job. Then the crowd grows more agitated, and he is shoved. Not surprisingly, the media overwhelmingly took the side of the young reporter.

While neither side acted appropriately, it’s clear that both the media and the protesters have a lot to improve on. The protesters shouldn’t have pushed Tai, and he shouldn’t have inserted himself into a group of private citizens when they didn’t consent to have their pictures taken.

In observing the reaction to the fray as an activist with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Morehead State University in Kentucky, I could take either side. And to everyone who says it’s impossible to be on both, let’s be honest; many journalists have an agenda. Whether it’s Matt Taibbi exposing the greed and corruption of Wall Street, Glenn Greenwald shining a light on the illegality of the modern surveillance state or Rebecca Solnit calling out the recklessness of the fossil fuel industry, we’ve all got our biases, and each of us has built a brand and an audience as a result of that agenda, including me. Protesters at the University of Missouri campus have a right to question the personal agenda of any journalist sticking a camera in their face.

As an activist, I’ve been the subject of many hostile interviews by corporate media reporters sent to protests with the goal of delegitimizing, discrediting and demonizing our cause and our comrades. While supporting a May Day protest in Detroit in 2014, a white reporter with Fox 2 Detroit asked me — a very white person in a crowd of black people — my opinion on Rep. John Conyers’ bill to give reparations to descendants of slaves, phrasing it as “Do you think it’s a good idea to give black people free money?” I explained that, in my opinion, it would be a tremendous boost to the economy and would likely create lots of jobs. Not surprisingly, the station left my interview out of the reporter’s segment.

At the same time, we journalists have not only the constitutional right to do our job but also the duty to report the biggest news of the day to our readers. Our editors have a right to send us to these locations with a microphone and camera handy, and we have the right to ask questions that people may or may not want to answer. One of the most important aspects of a healthy democracy is free media, with journalists able to access public documents, question public officials and document events that have a profound impact on our communities. Our purpose as an institution is to create national conversations about the most controversial issues of the day, which leads to more civic engagement, which creates tremendous value. In that respect, Mizzou protesters’ infringement of Tai’s First Amendment rights hurts us all.