SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 2.20.2025
A HUGE story about Prior Restraint and suppression of the right to publish.
Major media outlets are giving this story major coverage. I am going close to the site of this egregious Prior Restraint by a Judge in Mississippi.
All those who care about Press freedom must be concerned and alarmed.
Excerpted from Mississippi Today – Pulitzer Prize Winning Non-Profit News 2.20.2025
A Mississippi judge ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial criticizing the mayor of Clarksdale and city leaders after the officials sued the news outlet, leading press advocates to criticize the order as one of the most egregious First Amendment violations in recent years.
Charlie Mitchell is the former executive editor of the Vicksburg Post and an attorney. He is a assistant professor at the University of Mississippi’s School of Journalism and New Media, where he has taught media law for years. He told Mississippi Today there were so many issues with the judge’s order that he didn’t even “know where to start.”
“The First Amendment allows restraint of expression, including by the media, only extremely rarely and only when there is clear evidence of immediate and irreparable risk to the public — such as blocking publication that would identify confidential informants,” Mitchell said.
Without a hearing for the newspaper, Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin issued a temporary restraining order against the Clarksdale Press Register on Tuesday after the news outlet wrote a Feb. 8 editorial titled “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust.”
The column criticized the city for not sending the newspaper a notice about a meeting city commissioners held over a proposed effort to ask the state Legislature for permission to enact a local tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.
As of Thursday morning, the news outlet had removed the editorial from its website, but Wyatt Emmerich, the newspaper’s owner, told Mississippi Today that he intended to fight the judge’s order in court, which he called “absolutely astounding.”
The United States Supreme Court in the famous New York Times v. Sullivan has stood strongly for the right to publish without interference of censorship by government authorities.
Excerpted from The New York Times 2.20.2025
Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which supports free speech, criticized the city’s lawsuit, writing on social media that it was “wildly unconstitutional.”
He said that governments “can’t sue for libel” under New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark First Amendment decision issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled the freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limit the ability of a public official to sue for defamation.[1][2] The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with “actual malice“, meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false.[2] New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
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