THE LEAD: A judge in Mississippi, who had forced a local newspaper to remove an editorial critical of the city government from its website, reversed her decision on Wednesday, after the city dropped its lawsuit against the paper and the entire Fourth Estate lost its mind on her.

The judge, Crystal Wise Martin of Hinds County Chancery Court, lifted the order after Clarksdale city officials voted earlier this week to abandon their libel lawsuit against the local paper, The Clarksdale Press Register.

On Thursday, Wyatt Emmerich, the president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns the The Press Register, said that he planned to republish the editorial at the center of the case.

 

THE BACKGROUND: The Clarksdale Press Register wrote that the city was being shifty in not notifying the publication that it planned to ask for a 2 percent “sin tax” at a Feb. 4 special meeting. The editorial also alleged the city leaders might have ulterior, personal motives for keeping the press ignorant of the event to give the proposal a smoother ride.

It turned out, the city clerk drafted the notice, but forgot to send it to the paper. The clerk apologized, but the horse was already out of the barn. The city voted at its next meeting to sue for libel, and that the editorial was likely to create problems at the legislative level for the bill.

As part of the suit, the city asked the court to force the paper to remove the editorial from its website, which the judge did, prior to her subsequent reversal.

 

STUPIDITY ON PARADE: First Amendment proponents (and college students cramming for their media law midterms) can easily point to why both parts of the city’s claims are stupid.

First, a city can’t sue for libel like Clarksdale was doing and get away with it. The 1964 NY Times v. Sullivan case set the standard for this issue, in that a public figure must demonstrate that the publication acted with “actual malice,” meaning it knew it was wrong and did something anyway. In this case, it was clear the paper DIDN’T have the document and that was the crux of the argument.

The only place it comes close to being problematic is in the paragraph: “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.” However, you can’t libel someone with a question, which is how all those talking heads on B-list “news” outlets have gotten away with their outlandish crap for years.

(I’d love to try this some time for marketing purposes: “Can we assume that using textbooks other than those written by Vince Filak means your media instructor is a psychopathic pedophile with several dead bodies in their garage?” I think I just heard one of the folks at Sage drop like a stone…)

Second, nothing says, “Let’s keep this quiet,” like starting a lawsuit against a newspaper, thus GUARANTEEING everyone on Earth is going to find out about this and want to read it. In fact, the paper reestablished the editorial on its website after the court ruling, and you can read the paper’s piece here.

The Press Register claims a weekly readership of 7,750. To put that in context, we were cranking out about 14,000 DAILY COPIES of the Ball State Daily News in Muncie, Indiana when I was advising that student newspaper back in the 2000s. Still, something tells me the Google searches for that place could draw enough energy to dim the sun after this ham-handed censorship effort and it’s not because people were excited to learn about “the birthplace of the blues” all of a sudden.

 

QUOTE OF THE YEAR: This one comes from Wyatt Emmerich, whose company owns the Press Register, talking about the city’s approach to this whole debacle:

“As I warned them, it blew up in their face and it created a national outcry,” he said. “It embarrassed the city, and they realized what they had done was a mistake.”