A Mississippi judge on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order requested by the city of Clarksdale requiring a local newspaper to remove a critical editorial from its website, a move that alarmed press advocates.
By Wednesday, the newspaper, The Clarksdale Press Register, had removed the editorial from its website. But Wyatt Emmerich, the president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns The Press Register, said he planned to challenge the judge’s order at a hearing next week.
“I’ve been in this business for five decades and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Mr. Emmerich said in an interview, adding that the judge had targeted “an editorial that is pretty plain vanilla, criticizing the City Council for not sending out the approporate notices.”
The Press Register, which dates to 1865 and serves about 7,750 readers, published the editorial on its website on Feb. 8 underline the headline, “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.”
The editorial criticized officials in Clarksdale, a city of about 14,000 residents near the Arkansas border, for what it said was their failure to notify the news media before they held a special meeting on Feb. 4, where they approved a resolution asking the Mississippi Legislature to impose a 2 percent tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.
“This newspaper was never notified,” the editorial read. “We know of no other media organization that was notified.”
The editorial also questioned city officials’ interest in the resolution.
“Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kickback from the community?” it asked. “Until Tuesday we had not heard of any. Maybe they just want a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea — at public expense.”
Clarksdale’s Board of Mayor and Commissioners voted on Feb. 13 to sue the newspaper for libel, saying the city clerk had created a public notice for the Feb. 4 board meeting but forgot to email a copy of it to Floyd Ingram, the editor and publisher of The Press Register, as she usually does.
After the meeting, Mr. Ingram went to the clerk’s office, where the clerk apologized for not sending him the notice and gave him a copy of it and the resolution that had been approved, city officials said.
In their lawsuit against The Press Register, city officials said that efforts by the mayor, Chuck Espy, to lobby for the tax proposal in Jackson, the state capital, had been “chilled and hindered due to the libelous assertions and statements by Mr. Ingram.”
On Tuesday, Judge Crystal Wise Martin of the Chancery Court of Hinds County, Miss., granted the city’s request for a temporary restraining order and told the newspaper to remove the editorial from its “online portals” and to make it inaccessible to the public.
“The injury in this case is defamation against public figures through actual malice in reckless disregard of the truth and interferes with their legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality during this current legislative cycle,” Judge Martin wrote.
Mr. Ingram referred questions on Wednesday to Emmerich Newspapers. Mr. Emmerich said the editorial was clearly free speech protected by the Constitution.
“I don’t know how they can argue that a critical editorial is interfering with their businesses in a country that has a First Amendment that protects our right to criticize the government,” he said. “That’s the very idea of what an editorial in a newspaper does.”
The city’s lawsuit was part of what Mr. Emmerich described as an ongoing feud between The Press Register and Mr. Espy. He said that the newspaper had irked the mayor and other officials by reporting on their increased compensation and other issues and that “they’ve been at us ever since.”
Mr. Espy, a Democrat, said that the increased compensation had “nothing do with” the city’s lawsuit against the newspaper and “its malicious lies.” He said the city had threatened to sue the newspaper in the past, forcing it to retract an article.
“The only thing we’re asking for in city government is to simply write the truth, good or bad,” Mr. Espy said. “And I’m very thankful that the judge agreed to impose a T.R.O. against a rogue newspaper that insisted on telling lies against the municipality.”
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.
“Free-speech threats come from all corners of society, whether it’s the president of the United States or a mayor, and they come from all political parties,” Mr. Steinbaugh said in an interview on Wednesday. He said that once “we start eroding those rights, all other rights are threatened.”
Layne Bruce, executive director of the Mississippi Press Association, said he supported The Press Register’s right to publish the editorial and its effort to challenge the judge’s order.
“This is a rather astounding order,” he said, “and we feel it’s egregious and chilling and it clearly runs afoul of the First Amendment.”
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