Mississippi judge orders Clarksdale newspaper to take down editorial

Copyright Mississippi Today, used with permission. 

By Tony Pederson

The editorial published by the Press Register that a judge ordered taken down.

A state judge in Mississippi has granted a request for a temporary restraining order and ordered the newspaper in Clarksdale, Miss., to remove an editorial. Judge Crystal Wise Martin of the Chancery Court of Hinds County ordered The Clarksdale Press Register to remove the editorial from online portals and make the editorial inaccessible to the public.

The newspaper published an editorial on Feb. 8 with the headline, “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.” The editorial criticized city leaders for what the newspaper said was a failure to notify news media of a special called meeting to discuss a proposed tax increase on alcohol, tobacco and marijuana sales. City officials voted 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 the notice to the publisher of the Press Register. 

The judge’s ruling has been widely criticized by First Amendment lawyers and journalists. The Mississippi Press Association, the trade group for the newspapers and digital media in Mississippi, has strongly objected to the ruling and said it will support the Press Register’s effort to overturn it.

Clarksdale is a town of about 14,000 residents in the Mississippi Delta. It is about 75 miles south of Memphis near the Arkansas border. The Press Register has been published since 1865 and is owned by Emmerich Newspapers.

Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, told The New York Times in an interview, “I’ve been in this business for five decades and I’ve never seen anything quite like this.” Emmerich said that, in his opinion, the editorial “is pretty plain vanilla, criticizing the City Council for not sending out the appropriate notices.”

“This outrageous ruling goes against the most basic foundation of the First Amendment, namely that the government cannot tell a newspaper what it can and cannot say. It is so egregious that it almost certainly will be overturned by a higher court,” said Charles Overby, chairman of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. “The First Amendment means a mayor or a judge can’t remove even a comma from a newspaper, let alone an editorial.” 

In an editorial strongly condemning the ruling, Mississippi Today noted that the judge had granted the restraining order and ordered the editorial taken down without a hearing. “Someone needs to remind Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin of this fundamental of American democracy. And of a few points of law,” the editorial read. The editorial quoted longtime Mississippi editor, columnist and attorney Charles Mitchell, a member of the Overby Center panel of experts, as saying that there were so many things wrong with the decision, it’s hard to know where to start.

In a statement on the Mississippi Press Association website, the organization’s president said the MPA would support the Clarksdale newspaper in its appeal. "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 MPA President George R. Turner, publisher of The Greene County Herald in Leakesville and The Richton Dispatch. "We support the Clarksdale newspaper's efforts to seek relief in this case and to have a terrible decision reversed."

MPA executive Director Layne Bruce called the judge’s decision “an egregious overreach that clearly runs counter to First Amendment rights.”

Overby, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor at the Clarion Ledger in Jackson early in his career and former CEO of the Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C., said, “The First Amendment has stood the test of time for more than 200 years, but it will take a vigilant public for it to survive the 21st century.”

The judge in the case has ordered a hearing on the temporary restraining order for Feb. 27. 

————————————————————————————————————————————--

Tony Pederson is managing fellow of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics and professor emeritus in journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.