November 22, 2023

Ed. note: The Daily Media Update will return Monday, November 27. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Courts

Carolina Journal: Judge rejects injunction in Earls’ federal First Amendment lawsuit

.....A federal judge has rejected state Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls’ request for a preliminary injunction in her lawsuit against the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission. Earls argues that a commission investigation into her comments has unconstitutionally chilled her speech about matters of public interest.

US District Judge William Osteen issued a 54-page order Tuesday explaining his decision.

Tallahassee Democrat: Second pro-Palestinian student group sues DeSantis for alleged First Amendment violations

By Douglas Soule

.....Another Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has filed a federal lawsuit over Gov. Ron DeSantis' directive to shut down the group.

"Governors cannot shut down lawful and peaceful student groups because of the views they express," the University of South Florida chapter writes in the lawsuit, filed Monday in Gainesville. "The First Amendment forbids it."

Reason: Trump Gag Order Raises Unsettled Constitutional Questions

By Jacob Sullum

....."I'll be the only politician in history" who "won't be allowed to criticize people," Donald Trump complained last month. He was referring to the gag order issued by the judge who is overseeing the federal case that charges him with illegally conspiring to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

While Trump's claim was characteristically hyperbolic, the order does raise serious constitutional questions that are surprisingly unsettled. That much was clear on Monday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit considered Trump's First Amendment objections to the speech restrictions that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed on October 16.

Congress

The Hill: Exclusive: 5 Senate Banking Dems demand more details on corporate lobbying strategy

By Taylor Giorno

.....In a letter Wednesday shared exclusively with The Hill, five Democrats who sit on the Senate Banking Committee urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require companies to disclose more details on their corporate lobbying strategy to shareholders.

The senators want the SEC to develop a new rule that would “require registered companies to disclose, as relevant, any lobbying strategy, the aggregate amount of direct or indirect contributions to registered state and federal lobbyists, and any material risks related to or arising from the registrant’s lobbying strategy and expenditures.”

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) as well as Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) signed onto the letter.

Candidates and Campaigns

Reason: Ron DeSantis Rediscovers the First Amendment's Protections for Anonymous Speech

By Eric Boehm

....."No matter how she tries to spin it, Haley can't take back her 'Day One' plan to have the government strip Americans of their First Amendment rights," DeSantis campaign spokesman Bryan Griffin said last week…

Still, the whole exchange creates a bit of an awkward situation for DeSantis, who is just a few months removed from making his own attacks on anonymous speech.  During a livestreamed event in March, DeSantis criticized the media's use of anonymous sources and suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court might be "receptive" to revisiting its landmark 1964 decision that raised the bar for defamation lawsuits filed by public figures.

Meanwhile, a bill introduced in the Florida Legislature earlier this year and backed by DeSantis aimed to make several changes to how Florida law handles defamation cases filed against news organizations. Among the changes was a provision telling courts to regard as false any content from anonymous sources, unless it could be proven true.

The States

Wall Street Journal: Inside Ohio State’s DEI Factory

By John Sailer

.....These examples come from more than 800 pages of “Diversity Faculty Recruitment Reports” at Ohio State University, which I obtained through a public-records request. Until recently, Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences required every search committee to create such a report, which had to be approved by various deans before finalists for a job were interviewed.

In February 2021, then-president Kristina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and “social equity” and “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires” (the acronym stands for black, indigenous and people of color). These reports show what higher education’s outsize investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” looks like in practice. Ohio State sacrificed both academic freedom and scholarly excellence for the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity.

Daily Caller: Gov. Kathy Hochul Unveils Effort To Devise ‘Misinformation’ Toolkit For K-12 Students

By Jason Cohen

.....Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a new initiative on Tuesday for teaching students in her state to detect “misinformation” online.

Hochul tasked the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to create a “Media Literacy Tool Kit for K-12 Schools” to assist public school teachers in educating students on “how to spot misinformation/disinformation/malinformation (‘MDM’) online,” according to a announcement. Hochul is also pushing social media companies to combat hate because of a massive rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic content online since the Israel-Hamas War, according to a letter she sent to the platforms on Tuesday…

Hochul and Bray also discussed “threat assessment teams” monitoring social media during the announcement.

“They’re not looking at your Instagram sunset posts or your tweets about your favorite football team, and they’re not here to penalize anyone for their political views,” Hochul asserted. “They have a simple goal, to find out what’s driving hateful behavior and intervene early before harm is done.”

Hochul’s letter to social media platforms urges them to have strongly enforced policies against objectionable speech and to enlist sufficient staff to tackle information threats.