Judge Orders Newspaper To Delete Editorial Critical of City Government
After a lawsuit from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the city backed down. But it's still part of a worrying trend.
A city sued a local newspaper for libel over an editorial that was critical of the local government. A judge took the city's side and ordered the editorial scrubbed from the internet. The city backed down amid backlash, but that doesn't erase its blatantly unconstitutional attempt at censorship, nor the court's agreement to go along with it.
Earlier this month, the mayor and city council of Clarksdale, Mississippi passed a resolution to impose a 2 percent tax on retailers selling alcohol, tobacco, hemp, and marijuana. The proceeds of the tax would benefit "public safety, crime prevention, and continuing economic growth in the city."
On February 8, The Clarksdale Press Register published an editorial—credited to the paper as a whole but written by publisher Floyd Ingram. Titled "Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust," the piece seemed to support the proposal, in theory: "Your Clarksdale Press Register will be the first to say that a sin tax that would pay police to fight crime in Clarksdale is a good idea….More police will lead to more patrols, more patrols will lead to more arrests, more arrests will lead to less crime and less crime will make us all feel safer in our homes and neighborhoods."
But the author complained that while the city government "sent [the] resolution to the Mississippi Legislature," it "fail[ed] to go to the public with details about this idea" first. "As with all legislation, the devil is in the details and how legislation often morphs into something else that benefits somebody else."
"Maybe [city commissioners] just want a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea—at public expense," the editorial wondered.
"I customarily e-mail the media any Notice of Special Meeting," the city clerk later confirmed in an affidavit, "however, I inadvertently failed to do so" in this case. Ingram went to her office and got a copy of the notice, the order, and the agenda after the meeting had concluded; according to the clerk's affidavit, the meeting only lasted four minutes.
The incident is, at the very least, embarrassing to the city government. And yet instead of challenging the Press Register's assertion or explaining itself, the city took legal action.
On February 13, the city council voted unanimously to sue the Press Register for libel over its editorial. "I would like for the record to reflect," added Mayor Chuck Espy, "even though I did not vote, I am in full support, and I am fully vested in the decisions that the four commissioners unanimously said."
Last week, Judge Crystal Wise Martin of the Chancery Court of Hinds County ruled in favor of the city, issuing a temporary restraining order that required the paper to "remove the article…from their online portals and make it inaccessible to the public." The editorial was scrubbed from the website but can still be accessed through the Internet Archive.
"THANK GOD! The City of Clarksdale WON today!" Espy said in a statement posted to Facebook. "The judge ruled in our favor that a newspaper cannot tell a malicious lie and not be held liable….Thank You, God, for a judicial system."
But outside the city government, the decision received near-universal condemnation. "We fully support the rights of the Clarksdale Press Register and all of our members to report on the business of local government and to offer editorial comment on their opinion pages," said George R. Turner, president of the Mississippi Press Association.
"The press association feels this is an egregious overreach and that it clearly runs counter to First Amendment rights," added Layne Bruce, that organization's executive director.
The Scioto Valley Guardian, a newspaper in Ohio, published the editorial in its own pages in solidarity.
"The city of Clarksdale, Mississippi, thinks it knows better than the Founders," Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said in a statement. "In the United States, the government can't determine what opinions may be shared in the public square. A free society does not permit governments to sue newspapers for publishing editorials."
FIRE agreed to represent the Press Register in court, but earlier this week, the city dropped its lawsuit. That's certainly good news, but the fact that city officials felt entitled to sue a newspaper for printing factual, if embarrassing, information—and that a judge ruled in the city's favor—is yet another example of government officials flagrantly violating the Constitution's guarantee of a free press.
For one thing, nothing in the Press Register's editorial is untrue: While Ingram did receive a copy of the notice, the clerk still acknowledged that she had not furnished it ahead of time, which is what Ingram claimed.
Further, as FIRE noted this week in a press release, "the government itself cannot sue citizens for libel." Indeed, in the landmark 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court affirmed that "for good reason, 'no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence,'" as such a proposal "has disquieting implications for criticism of governmental conduct."
And even if the city could sue, Sullivan sets a high bar for criticism of public officials: "A State cannot under the First and Fourteenth Amendments award damages to a public official for defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves 'actual malice'—that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false."
Suggesting that city officials may have had an ulterior motive in the way they do things may or may not be true, but it is not libelous. "If asking whether a politician might be corrupt was libel, virtually every American would be bankrupt," said FIRE attorney Josh Bleisch. "For good reason, courts have long held that political speech about government officials deserves the widest latitude and the strongest protection under the First Amendment."
Thankfully, this story so far ends with the city getting its nose bloodied in the court of public opinion and retreating from its overtly censorial position. But other than the risk of additional damage to the city's reputation, there's nothing to suggest that officials may not try again—nor to guarantee the judge won't grant such a blatantly unconstitutional request the next time she's asked.
The saga of the Press Register is not even the first time in recent years that officials have targeted local newspapers. In August 2023, police in Kansas served a search warrant on the Marion County Record, seizing computers and cell phones from the newspaper's offices, its reporters, and even the homes of the paper's owner and a local councilwoman. The paper frequently raised the ire of the local police: At the time, one of its reporters was questioning the circumstances under which Police Chief Gideon Cody had left his prior job, and police searched her desk during the raid. Cody would resign as chief in October 2023, just a few weeks after the raid.
The county attorney appointed two special prosecutors to investigate the handling of the raid; in their final report, they recommended charging Cody with obstruction of judicial process, which took place in August 2024. But they also determined that ultimately, "it is not a crime under Kansas law for a law enforcement officer to conduct a poor investigation and reach erroneous conclusions."
