The “fake news media” has been prosecuted throughout 2017 in the kangaroo court that is President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, but in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., the definition of journalism itself is on trial.

The answer to the question will decide the fate of one of six people currently on trial for their proximity to the protests that took place around Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Independent photographer and videographer Alexei Wood was arrested with hundreds of protesters, medics, and journalists in response to the violent actions of a few protesters on that day.

On Thursday, Wood’s attorney, Brett Cohen, tried to get jurors at the D.C. Superior Court to understand the distinction between his client’s coverage of the violent acts at the protest and the commission of the violent acts themselves.

In an interview with The Intercept, Wood said that part of the government’s case against him revolves around defining who is — and, in his case, isn’t — a journalist. That’s not a determination the state can make, he said.

“They can take issue with my professionalism and my style, but they can’t decide what is or isn’t journalism,” Wood said. “They don’t get to have that.”

Wood is an independent photojournalist from San Antonio, Texas, whose work focuses on resistance movements. He arrived in D.C. last January planning to document protests around the inauguration — both on January 20 and the Women’s March the following day. But Wood’s coverage of the weekend ended abruptly when he, along with over 200 others, were penned into an area at the intersection of L and 12th streets and arrested en masse.

Individuals arrested at the Inauguration Day protests, known as J20, are being charged under blanket statutes for crimes committed during the action, including bashing windows and other property damage. To make its case against nearly 200 defendants, the prosecution is using the Pinkerton liability rule, which attributes every crime committed during a conspiracy to all those involved. In practice, this means that all defendants on trial for the protests can be convicted for all crimes committed during the action by mere virtue of their proximity to the crimes committed.

Wood’s prosecution is alarming as a reflection of the government’s attempt to define — and criminalize — journalism, but the case as a whole also speaks to the government’s attempt to undermine the First Amendment right to political speech. “The government is prosecuting this case as though DisruptJ20” — the name given to the protest — “were a run-of-the-mill criminal conspiracy, where the only objective is criminal in nature, rather than a political demonstration designed to make a statement about the current administration,” Shana Knizhnik, an attorney with the ACLU-DC, told The Intercept in an email. “This framing undermines the fundamental principles of the First Amendment.”

“The concept of who is a journalist is so nebulous in today’s landscape,” Wood told The Intercept, referring to the prevalence of independent journalists. “The ability to produce information is democratized.”

Cohen, Wood’s lawyer, raised the question of citizen journalism in his closing argument last week. “What is a journalist?” he asked rhetorically. “One thing we know about journalism is that the internet’s kind of expanding that definition,” Cohen said to the jury. “More people are broadcasting things. More people are reporting things.”

If the prosecution has its way, Cohen argued, journalists will not be protected if their actions can in any way be construed as sympathetic to the movements they’re covering — up to and including such dubious ground as simply walking with a group of protesters who happen to engage in violent activities.

The prosecution had submitted into evidence live stream footage captured by Wood, during which he could be heard cheering as other people sprayed graffiti and broke windows. The court last week decided that Wood’s cheering of the act did not rise to the level of incitement.

In his bid to establish Wood’s credibility as a journalist, Cohen presented the court with emails between the journalist and editors at a San Antonio-based news outlet. In one email, Wood said he was “specifically focusing in on street friction, protest and support and police.”

Jim Naureckas, editor of media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said he hopes the jury rejects the charges and rules against the government. Otherwise, the potential for accurate coverage of actions of dissent in American politics will suffer. “If these indictments are not rejected by juries,” Naureckas said, “we’ll see even less coverage of dissent than we already do, once it’s established that telling people about anything forbidden by police is the same as committing those acts.”

Naureckas added, “It’s truly an Orwellian moment.”