Feb 20, 2025 Story by: Editor
A Mississippi judge on Tuesday granted a temporary restraining order requested by the city of Clarksdale, directing a local newspaper to take down a critical editorial from its website. The decision has sparked concerns among press advocates.
By Wednesday, The Clarksdale Press Register had complied with the order and removed the editorial. However, Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns The Press-Register, announced plans to challenge the ruling in a hearing next week.
“I’ve been in this business for five decades and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Emmerich stated in an interview, emphasizing that the editorial in question was “pretty plain vanilla, criticizing the City Council for not sending out the appropriate notices.”
The Press-Register, established in 1865 and serving approximately 7,750 readers, published the editorial on February 8 under the title, “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.”
The piece accused Clarksdale officials of failing to notify the media about a special meeting held on February 4, during which they approved a resolution requesting the Mississippi Legislature to impose a 2 percent tax on alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco.
“This newspaper was never notified,” the editorial stated. “We know of no other media organization that was notified.”
It also questioned city officials’ motivations behind 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.”
On February 13, Clarksdale’s Board of Mayor and Commissioners voted to sue the newspaper for libel. City officials contended that the city clerk had prepared a public notice for the February 4 meeting but had inadvertently failed to email a copy to Floyd Ingram, The Press Register’s editor and publisher, as she usually does.
Following the meeting, Ingram visited the clerk’s office, where the clerk acknowledged the oversight, apologized, and provided him with a copy of the notice and the approved resolution, officials said.
In their lawsuit, city officials claimed that Mayor Chuck Espy‘s lobbying efforts for the tax proposal in Jackson 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, Mississippi, granted the city’s request for a temporary restraining order, instructing the newspaper to remove the editorial from its “online portals” and 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.
Ingram directed inquiries to Emmerich Newspapers. Emmerich argued that the editorial was a form of 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.”
Emmerich also characterized the lawsuit as part of an ongoing dispute between The Press-Register and Espy. He asserted that the newspaper had drawn the mayor’s ire by covering issues such as increased compensation for officials, adding that “they’ve been at us ever since.”
Espy, a Democrat, denied any connection between the lawsuit and officials’ compensation, instead accusing the newspaper of publishing “malicious lies.” He noted that the city had previously threatened legal action against the paper, prompting it to retract an article.
“The only thing we’re asking for in city government is to simply write the truth, good or bad,” 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 with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for free speech, condemned the city’s legal action, calling it “wildly unconstitutional” on social media.
He pointed to New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling, which established that governments “cannot sue for libel.”
“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,” Steinbaugh said in an interview on Wednesday. He warned that “once we start eroding those rights, all other rights are threatened.”
Layne Bruce, executive director of the Mississippi Press Association, also voiced support for The Press Register’s right to publish the editorial and its intent to challenge the restraining order.
“This is a rather astounding order,” Bruce said. “We feel it’s egregious and chilling, and it clearly runs afoul of the First Amendment.”
Source: The New York Times
