Last week, we brought you the story of a city council in Mississippi that was so thin-skinned that it couldn’t handle a critical editorial in the local paper. The City of Clarksdale took the Clarksdale Press Register to court over an op-ed in which the editors questioned why the city lobbied the state government for a “sin tax” without notifying the citizens or local media.
“The editorial highlighted how the mayor has touted his ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ governance, yet he and the city council didn’t notify the press about its intentions despite promising to ‘give appropriate notice thereof to the media,’” I wrote last week. “The editors admitted that they support the tax, yet they questioned why the city left everyone in the dark about the lobbying efforts.”
In the court filing, the city clerk admitted that she forgot to notify the media of the city’s efforts, which turned out to be a violation of state law. Nevertheless, Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued an order demanding that the paper take the editorial off its website — without a hearing that would give the paper a chance to tell its side of the story.
“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, the Press Register’s publisher. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”
The order set off a First Amendment firestorm, and the paper enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to help defend itself against this unconstitutional onslaught. By the end of last week, FIRE had agreed to help the Press Register work to lift the judge’s order.
“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”
Hellbound and Down 