The Mississippi judge who ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial from its website has reversed herself. But this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin rescinded her temporary restraining order after the owner of The Clarksdale Press Register and the board of commissioners in that city agreed to settle a dispute that had resulted in a libel suit being filed. The commissioners agreed to drop the suit while Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, said the paper will publish a less incendiary version of the editorial, according to Michael Levenson of The New York Times (gift link).
That does not change the reality that Judge Martin leaped in to help city officials by censoring the newspaper, even though the First Amendment protects libelous materials from being subjected to prior restraint. Libel can, of course, be punished after the fact through a civil suit, although government agencies cannot sue for libel.
The editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
The city sued the Press Register, claiming that the editorial was libelous and that it “chilled and hindered” the council’s work. Mayor Chuck Espy was quoted by Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press as saying the editorial had unfairly implied that officials had violated the law. He cited a section of the editorial that asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back from the community?”
Now here’s where matters get complicated. DeMillo originally reported that the editorial asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-backs from the community?” Apparently that part of the story was inaccurate, though, as the editorial had actually used the word “kick-back,” singular. DeMillo’s follow-up includes this:
Emmerich had offered to clarify that the council said the lack of notification wasn’t a deliberate attempt to hide the meeting, according to a text message Emmerich sent to the city attorney. The text also offered to clarify that a sentence questioning whether there was “kick-back from the community” should have said “push back.”
We all know what kickbacks are. But the singular “kickback” does lend credence to the notion that someone at the paper simply had a brain cramp and wrote “kickback” when they meant “pushback.”
The coverage by both the AP and the Times is a little confusing in that they quote Emmerich as saying that his offer to publish a clarification was no longer on the table — but the Times also reports that he plans to republish the editorial, presumably using “pushback” rather than “kickback.”
The Times also quotes Emmerich as saying, “As I warned them, it blew up in their face and it created a national outcry. It embarrassed the city, and they realized what they had done was a mistake.” I hope he’s right, but I suspect he’s wrong.
Rather, I think both city officials and Judge Martin will conclude that their rapid action in suing for libel and issuing a takedown order resulted in an unacceptably feisty media outlet being brought to heel.
A plea for mutual aid
Richard J. Tofel has some useful thoughts in his newsletter, Second Rough Draft, on ways that journalists might band together to fight back against the threat posed to the role of the press in a free society by Donald Trump’s embrace of authoritarianism.
It’s worth reading in full, but I especially agree with Tofel’s assertion that it’s past time for news organizations to stand in solidarity with The Associated Press by refusing to attend events from which the AP has been banned. The AP is being punished because of its refusal to go along with Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Tofel writes:
I have thought, since Trump had his first tantrum on this subject, that others covering the White House should decline to go where the AP is barred. I believe, from a lifetime of studying White House-press relations, after early service working in the White House press office, that if outlets like the New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters took such steps, readers would compel many others to follow as a demonstration of the independence they value, and that Trump would be left on his airplane and behind his big desk with an amen choir of outlets thus branded as the quasi-state media — the American Pravda, Izvestia and lesser lights— that places like Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit and the Blaze have become.
Tofel adds: “This hasn’t happened, at least yet, because the people ostensibly closest to the situation convinced themselves that it could be resolved quietly and consensually. Their judgment was entitled to a respectful hearing, but it should not have been determinative.”
It didn’t work. And now it’s time for the White House press corps to escalate. If they all get banned, so be it.
GBH restores two programs
Two GBH News programs canceled amid a budget crisis last year are returning, according to an announcement. “Basic Black,” which covers the Black experience, will be relaunched as “GBH News Rooted,” with a presence on broadcast television, YouTube and radio. The host will be Paris Alston. Meanwhile, the venerable news and interview program “Greater Boston” will also be returning on multiple platforms later this year.
The station eliminated both of those programs plus “Talking Politics” last May, albeit with a promise that they would be brought back at some point. This week’s announcement makes no mention of “Talking Politics” — or of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” which was the station’s highest rated program when it was canceled in 2021. (Note: I was part of “Beat the Press” and also wrote a weekly column for its website for many years.)
These are extraordinarily difficult times for public media, as cuts have been announced in city after city over the past year, and as the Trump administration threatens to cut off funds. In this climate, any forward motion is welcome news.
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