The Lexington Minuteman would not approve. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.
Kyle York had a simple request. He asked the school department in Lexington, Massachusetts, to provide him with public records in order to bolster his request that the system provide support services for his daughter, who has dyslexia.
But thanks to the state’s notoriously weak public records law, school officials were able to stonewall him by demanding fees that were grossly excessive, essentially daring him to file an appeal. Fortunately for York, those officials were also sloppy — they documented their ruse in an email and included that email in a trove of records that they eventually provided to him without charge, Christopher Huffaker reports (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe.
In his story, he includes an incredibly blatant internal email sent to a school employee by Kristen McGrath, the executive administrative assistant for human resources:
Attached is a spreadsheet and it looks like a pdf of the spreadsheet. The dates are 2019-2025. Can you over estimate the time it would take to compile/copy the invoices requested and let me know when you have a chance? Hopefully, when I let them know the cost they will not want to do it.
Thank you!
Kristen
The subterfuge has earned a New England Muzzle Award for the Lexington Public Schools. As Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, tells the Globe, “It’s a symptom of our poor public records law that allows those in government agencies, whether it’s a school or some other public body, to play games with the law to withhold records that should be given to the public, and most of the time do so without any kind of accountability.”
York has been fighting for services to help his daughter for some time. In February 2024, Shannon Garrido of The Lexington Observer reported that he was one of a number of parents who were frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of support for their children.
“We probably spent in the last year like $20,000, between advocates, attorneys, [and] private tutors,” York told Garrido at that time.
As Huffaker reports in the Globe, York has received an apology from Schools Supt. Julie Hackett. But the article also notes that the public records law, despite some tightening up in 2016, remain grossly inadequate, with uncertain prospects for anyone who appeals to the secretary of state’s office and the attorney general, plus little in the way of penalties for offending government officials.
I’m not ready to give a New England Muzzle Award to state Rep. Steven Xiarhos, R-Barnstable, just yet. But a proposal he talked about last week in response to so-called street takeovers in five Massachusetts communities raises concerns about freedom of speech.
In a story reported by John L. Micek and Heather Morrison for MassLive, Xiarhos said he planned to file two bills aimed at cracking down on participants. One would upgrade the penalty for assaulting a police officers from a misdemeanor in most cases to a felony. The other would prohibit street takeovers and, as the MassLive account puts it, would punish “spectators and participants alike.”
Spectators?
That second proposal is reportedly based on a 2022 Florida law that prohibits street takeovers. The relevant section of the law says:
A person may not: Drive any motor vehicle in any street takeover, stunt driving, race, speed competition or contest, drag race or acceleration contest, test of physical endurance, or exhibition of speed or acceleration or for the purpose of making a speed record on any highway, roadway, or parking lot….
A person may not be a spectator at any race, drag race, or street takeover prohibited under [the law as quoted above].
“You need to respect police officers. They’re risking their lives for us 24/7,” Xiarhos was quoted as saying. The MassLive story continues:
“I believe they’re part of a plan to cause havoc,” Xiarhos said of the takeovers, which are organized through guerilla-style posts on such social media sites as Instagram. “And when you allow someone to get away with things, it gets worse.”
“So we need to get tougher on them. And when they get caught, they need to be held in custody,” he continued. “Stop paying their bail and put them behind bars. That’s how you stop things. It’s not that hard. There’s only a few people that do wrong things. So get tougher on them.”
Now, the takeovers are clearly becoming a problem. As Molly Farrar reported for Boston.com, they popped up on Saturday, Oct. 4, in Boston, Fall River, Middleborough, Dedham and Randolph, in some cases accompanied by fireworks and, in the Boston incident, a police cruiser being set on fire. Gov. Maura Healey has vowed to take action.
The text of Xiarhos’ two bills is not available on his website, and perhaps they’re still being drafted. But when it comes to freedom of speech, we do not need to emulate Florida. Xiarhos also told WFXT-TV (Channel 25) anchor Kerry Kavanaugh that similar legislation has also either been filed or enacted in 22 states, including California. It would be interesting to know how many others include a spectator provision.
No one should be at risk of arrest simply because they’re there. And let me state the obvious: Such a provision could be used against journalists as well. I’ll be watching to see what Rep. Xiarhos actually files.
Hat tip to Andrew Quemere for flagging this on Bluesky.
Quincy City Hall, built in 1844. Photo (cc) 2019 by Antony-22.
Thomas Koch, the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, is under fire for blurting out on a radio talk show that the Catholic Church sexual-abuse crisis was a matter of “mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.”
Koch’s remarks, made on “NightSide with Dan Rea” on WBZ Radio, is just the latest controversy the mayor has jumped into, including a clearly unconstitutional plan to install two 10-foot statues of Catholic saints on public property at the city’s new public safety building (the subject of a New England Muzzle Award last May) and a 79% increase to his salary, from $159,000 to $285,000.
Adam Reilly of GBH News reports that Koch’s remarks on Dan Rea’s talk show came during a discussion of public antipathy toward religion, something that Koch and Rea both lamented. But when Rea brought up the “pedophile priest crisis,” Koch went off the rails. Reilly writes:
At that point Koch interjected, saying, “That was mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.” When Rea pushed back, saying there were lots of children and early teenagers who were impacted by abuse, Koch replied, “There were? Well, pedophilia’s a younger age than to me a teenager. But that’s another issue for another day. I [unintelligible] either at all, believe me.”
Reilly notes that Koch later apologized for his remarks:
Koch sent GBH News a statement after this article’s [initial] publication Thursday, saying that he had apologized directly to the local schools and LGBTQ+ community at a schools committee meeting Wednesday night. He said his comments were “ill-thought remarks” and he was caught off guard by the issue.
The incident prompted an editorial from the Boston Herald calling on Koch to resign (sub. req.), referring to his “insane lack of empathy,” adding:
On a basic human level, the mayor should be ashamed of himself. The crisis in the Catholic church will only truly heal when everyone acknowledges the institutional cancer that metastasized.
Meanwhile, Quincy voters will not have an opportunity to scale back Koch’s salary grab, which was approved earlier this year by the city council. Robert Bosworth reports for The Quincy Sun that a ballot measure to grant Koch a more modest 15% increase, to $183,000, fell short of the signature requirement. As a result, Simón Rios of WBUR observes, Koch will receive a higher salary than the mayors of Boston and New York City.
I awarded a Muzzle to Koch for pushing a plan to erect statues of two Catholic saints on public property after the ACLU of Massachusetts, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation sued the city on the grounds that it would violate the First Amendment separation of church and state. As Peter Blandino reported (sub. req.) for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy:
The statues depict St. Michael and St. Florian, the patron saints of policed officers and firefighters respectively. Plans for the statues, which have already been paid for at the price of $850,000, were developed by Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch and a close circle of advisors without informing residents or city councilors.
According to earlier reporting by Blandino, the statues had been criticized by at least one member of the city council as well as some local religious organizations. The ACLU voiced its objections as far back as February. But that didn’t stop Koch, who has insisted that the statues represent bravery, courage and service rather than religious messages.
The case was heard earlier this month in Norfolk Superior Court, reports Neal Riley of WBZ-TV. A ruling is expected soon.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.
The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.
• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”
• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:
While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globephotographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.
The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.
• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.
• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”
Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.
Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.
Every year around this time, I take note of Independence Day by writing about outrages against freedom of speech that unfolded in New England during the previous year. It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix, and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.)
For the past several years I’ve been writing up Muzzles as they come in rather than waiting to do an annual roundup. I skipped writing a roundup altogether in 2023, so I guess this is the 27th annual edition of the New England Muzzle Awards.
This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.
I’m especially pleased to be able to award a Muzzle to Trump’s shadowy top aide, Stephen Miller, for enabling the arrest of a Tufts Ph.D. student who helped write an op-ed piece for the student newspaper that he didn’t like.
Kudos, as always, to my friends Harvey Silverglate, who conceived of this annual feature all these years ago, and Peter Kadzis, who edited all 25 editions that appeared in the Phoenix and at GBH News. They were inspired by the Jefferson Muzzles, which no longer are awarded. Here in New England, though, their spirit lives on.
At a time when democracy itself is under threat, defending the First Amendment is more important than ever. The envelopes, please.
Sayles Hall at Brown University. Photo (cc) 2021 by Chris Rycroft.
Recalcitrant administrators, emails and phone calls that go unreturned, and complaints from the people they write about — student journalists have a hard time, just as journalists do everywhere.
What happened to Brown University student Alex Shieh, though, went well beyond that. According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, Shieh was investigated to determine whether he had violated the school’s code of conduct. Shieh’s offense was committing journalism by sending an email to 3,805 administrators in March and asking them, DOGE-like, “what tasks you performed in the past week.”
As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was accused of misrepresenting himself by claiming that he was a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication — except that he was telling the truth. (The Spectator had gone on hiatus but was revived recently, so it’s possible that particular accusation was technically accurate. Not that it matters. You don’t need a news outlet to exercise your First Amendment rights.)
Two other students were also investigated. Though the Times reports that all three were cleared, the university administration has earned a New England Muzzle Award for its censorious approach to journalists who ask tough questions. After all, none of those administrators who were emailed had to respond, and reportedly many of them didn’t. FIRE’s Coletti writes:
Brown’s response here flies in the face of its due process and free expression guarantees, and threatens to chill student reporting on campus. Due process is essential not just to guarantee defendants a fair shake, but to uphold the legitimacy of campus disciplinary proceedings. It also acts as a bulwark protecting students’ individual liberties.
By the way, Shieh is an occasional contributor to The Boston Globe, and Globe columnist Carine Hajjar reported on his plight several weeks ago. She noted that one of Shieh’s fellow students at the Spectator criticized him because he “sorted scores of administrators, by name, into pejorative categories … all before having conducted a single interview.”
That’s pretty poor journalistic practice. It’s also protected by the First Amendment, especially at an independent publication like the Spectator, which has no ties to the university. Indeed, the administration is trying to force the paper to drop “Brown” from its name.
“Instead of chilling dissenting takes inside its community, Brown should be keener than ever to cultivate them,” Hajjar wrote. “Otherwise it’s asking for the Trump administration to swoop in with instructions.”
Kevin Dale, executive editor of Colorado Public Radio. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
I haven’t seen any explanation for why three public radio outlets in Colorado joined NPR in suing the Trump administration over its threat to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’m glad they did, but it seems to me that all 246 member stations ought to sign on, including GBH and WBUR in Boston.
When I was in Colorado several years ago to interview people for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” CPR was perhaps the largest news organization in the state, with a staff of 65 journalists. (I say “perhaps” because executive editor Kevin Dale thought one or two television stations might be bigger.) Some cuts were made last year as business challenges hit a number of public broadcasting outlets as well as NPR itself.
The basis of the lawsuit, writes NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that CPB is an independent, private nonprofit that is funded by Congress. The suit claims that the president has no right to rescind any money through an executive order; only Congress can do that. Moreover, the suit contends that this is pure viewpoint discrimination, as demonstrated by Trump’s own words — that NPR and PBS, which also relies on CPB funding, present “biased and partisan news coverage.”
It was a decision oblivious to religious and cultural differences. Roxbury Municipal Court Judge Kenneth Fiandaca ruled recently that a Muslim woman would have to remove her niqab, a religious head scarf that covered most of her face, when she testified against her ex-boyfriend, who was on trial to face charges of domestic violence.
As Sean Cotter reported in The Boston Globe, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office said the ruling was “tantamount to a dismissal” since the woman had no intention of violating her religious beliefs by complying. And thus we present a New England Muzzle Award to Judge Fiandaca for his insistence on following the letter but ignoring the spirit of the Constitution.
Fiandaca was relying on the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees that a criminal defendant has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” In nearly all cases, that means a face-to-face encounter. Fiandaca was of the opinion that the accuser’s niqab, which covered all of her face except a slit for her eyes, amounted to a denial of the defendant’s rights.
If Fiandaca’s ruling had stood, the defendant would have immediately walked free without the jury having a chance to hear the woman’s testimony that “he was drunk and invaded her house, grabbed her by the throat, and punched her in the face while her current partner tried to fend him off,” as Cotter reported.
Fortunately a more legally astute mind prevailed. A single justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, Serge Georges Jr., ruled against Fiandaca, writing, “The right to confrontation is not absolute,” explaining that other courts have “recognized limited and exceptional circumstances in which a defendant’s rights under the Sixth Amendment … appropriately yield to competing constitutional interests.”
The woman was thus allowed to testify while wearing her niqab, and a jury found the defendant not guilty. But that’s not the point. The point is that her right to practice her Muslim faith should not have prevented her from appearing in court to give her version of what happened. Thanks to Justice Georges, her religious liberties were recognized, and justice was done.
The assault on freedom of expression being waged by the Trump White House is so wide-ranging that it’s hard to know where to begin. From threats against universities to bogus lawsuits targeting news organizations, it is clear that President Trump and his thuggish allies want to silence criticism and force civil society to cower in fear.
But there is one action in particular that stands out for its cruelty as well as its blatant disregard for the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and of the press. And that’s the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, who, at long last, was freed over the weekend. It also happens to have played out in New England, from her Soviet-style snatch-and-grab by black-clad ICE goons on the Tufts campus, where she’s a Ph.D. student, to her release at the hands of a federal judge in Vermont.
The anti-First Amendment intent of the government’s actions was underscored by U.S. District Judge William Sessions III in Burlington, Vermont, who said that he could find no reason for detaining Öztürk other than her co-authoring an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.
“That literally is the case. There is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed,” Sessions said, according to an account by Liz Crampton and Kyle Cheney in Politico. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”
Which is why this whole sordid affair is worthy of a New England Muzzle Award. In fact, it may be the most worthy Muzzle since I started handing them out at The Boston Phoenix 27 years ago.
But who should be the winner? My choice is Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the dark lord of Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Over the years, Miller has made his hatred for non-white immigrants clear, and though he generally directs his rhetoric at those who are undocumented, his overall contempt for people who don’t look like him permeates the Trump gang, starting at the very orange-hued top.
For example, here’s something that Miller wrote about Muslims for his high-school newspaper, according to a profile by William D. Cohan for Vanity Fair:
Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous.
And in a speech to his high-school classmates, Miller once said: “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do.”
Now, is it fair to cite things that Miller wrote and said in high school to build a case against him today? In his case, the answer is yes, because he devolved into exactly the sort of adult that he said he would nearly a quarter of a century ago. I mean, if you want something recent, he called for the suspension of habeas corpus — a basic protection against false imprisonment guaranteed not just by the Constitution but by Magna Carta — on Friday, as Steve Vladeck writes in his newsletter, One First.
ICE goons grab Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts.
As for Öztürk, her ordeal is not over yet. A Turkish citizen, she was attending Tufts legally on a student visa. That visa was revoked by the State Department on the grounds that her activism could create a “hostile environment for Jewish students” and that she might support “a designated terrorist organization,” according to an account by Rodrique Ngowi and Claire Rush in The Associated Press. But the State Department’s own case cites nothing except the op-ed, which merely argues that the university administration should uphold resolutions passed by the faculty senate.
In other words, Öztürk could still be deported for nothing more than expressing her views, which the First Amendment protects for anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. That would be an outrage, and if the Trump administration can find a judge who’s willing to go along, a second Muzzle Award might be looming on the horizon.
But at least Öztürk is free to defend herself, no longer locked up in a Louisiana detention facility, where she reportedly experienced multiple asthma attacks without access to her medication.
Sadly for all of us, it’s Miller Time. We can only hope that his day of reckoning is coming soon.
New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2005 by Ken Lund.
New Hampshire state Rep. Glenn Cordelli says he hasn’t read “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” 1999 young-adult novel by Stephen Chbosky that deals with issues such as sexual assault and mental health. But that hasn’t stopped him from having an opinion about it.
“If people think that this crap is culture, then we’re in bad trouble in New Hampshire,” the Republican legislator said at a recent hearing, according to a report by Anthony Brooks of WBUR Radio. “These explicit sexual materials have no place in our schools.”
When pressed by Democratic Sen. Debra Altschiller as to whether Cordelli had actually read the entire book, Cordelli replied that he had not — and that he had “no interest” in completing her homework assignment.
Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped Cordelli from filing a bill that would ease the way for parents to challenge books they don’t want their children to have access to. If the bill becomes law, such books could be “restricted or removed from public school classrooms and libraries,” Brooks writes. “The bill would allow parents to their take complaints to the state Department of Education, and expands state obscenity laws.”
For this assault on the right of kids to be educated, Cordelli has richly earned a New England Muzzle Award.
Cordelli’s proposal, House Bill 324, would ban depictions of “nudity,” “sadomasochistic abuse,” “sexual conduct” and “sexual excitement,” all of which are described in such excruciatingly explicit detail that one suspects the legislation itself might be banned from the classroom should it ever be enacted.
Brooks’ report also quotes Katie DeAngelis, a New Hampshire woman who said that reading Chbosky’s book helped her deal with her own experience of sexual assault. “What it did do is make me feel a lot less alone,” she told WBUR.
By the way, Cordelli appears to be quite a piece of work. According to Ethan DeWitt of the New Hampshire Bulletin, he has also filed a bill that would subject anyone who helps an unemancipated pregnant minor get an abortion to criminal and civil penalties.
The book ban that Cordelli and his fellow Republican legislators are pushing for comes in the midst of a repressive political climate in the Granite State. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and though Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has at least some moderate credentials, it’s unclear whether she would sign the bill or not.
But thanks to the state’s notoriously weak public records law, school officials were able to stonewall him by demanding fees that were grossly excessive, essentially daring him to file an appeal. Fortunately for York, those officials were also sloppy — they documented their ruse in an email and included that email in a trove of records that they eventually provided to him without charge, Christopher Huffaker reports (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe.
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