The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech April 3, 2024 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]. In the News Des Moines Register: Bleeding Heartland journalist wins $50K settlement in suit challenging press pass denial By Tyler Jett .....Iowa state officials agreed Tuesday to pay attorney's fees and change state House policies to settle a lawsuit from a liberal blogger who was denied a press pass for coverage of the Legislature. The three-member State Appeals Board voted unanimously to approve a settlement agreement with Laura Belin, who has operated the Bleeding Heartland political blog for 17 years. Belin sued Meghan Nelson, chief clerk of the Republican-run Iowa House of Representatives, after Nelson denied her request for a press pass at the start of the legislative session in January. The pass gives journalists access to desks on the House floor. According to Belin's lawsuit, Nelson did not provide a reason for her denial this year. But after Belin sued, Nelson gave Belin a press pass on Jan. 23 and changed the House policy on qualifications for a credential, eliminating a requirement that journalists be "nonpartisan." As part of the settlement approved Tuesday, the state will pay $49,000 to Belin's attorneys at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Free Speech. Belin agreed to dismiss the lawsuit, and Nelson agreed to keep the "nonpartisan" requirement out of the House press credential policy. Nelson also agreed that if she denies future press credential applications, she will cite the specific element of the policy that she believes applies. New from the Institute for Free Speech Comments to the FEC on Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom .....On April 2, 2024, the Institute for Free Speech submitted comments to the Federal Election Commission in regards to the Advisory Opinion Request 2024-05 (Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom). Read a PDF of the comments here. Supreme Court New York Times: Stephen Breyer: The Supreme Court I Served On Was Made Up of Friends By Stephen Breyer .....Recently, the Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett spoke together publicly about how members of the court speak civilly to one another while disagreeing, sometimes vigorously, about the law. Considerable disagreement on professional matters among the Supreme Court justices, important as they are, remain professional, not personal. The members of the court can and do get along well personally. That matters. In my tenure, this meant that we could listen to one another, which increased the chances of agreement or compromise. It means that the court will work better for the nation that it serves. And I wonder: If justices who disagree so profoundly can do so respectfully, perhaps it is possible for our politically divided country to do the same. The Courts Law & Crime: ‘What’s going on is illegal as hell’: Raided newspaper in small town takes on mayor, police chief, sheriff in sprawling lawsuit alleging revenge and possible wrongful death By Brandi Buchman .....Crying and clutching a walker, Joan Meyer, 98, told the armed police chief standing in her living room last summer that if they kept ransacking the house she shared with her son Eric Meyer, 70 — her co-publisher of the Marion County Record in Kansas, a newspaper serving under 2,000 people — they were going to kill her from the stress. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen … This is the first time I’ve ever had police in my house threatening me … I’m not dumb. I may be ninety-some years old, but I know what’s going on. And what’s going on is illegal as hell,” Joan Meyer said after she tried to call her son whose phone, “in a cruel twist,” a new lawsuit against the county’s mayor, police chief and sheriff alleges, was already “tucked inside an evidence bag” by police who obtained it with a warrant based on false statements. Congress Daily Wire: Docs Show Corporate Giants Are ‘Colluding To Demonetize Conservative Platforms,’ Judiciary Committee Says By Luke Rosiak .....The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether major advertisers ran afoul of antitrust laws by coordinating about which news outlets to blackball. The committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), obtained documents from the World Federation of Advertisers that show how it implemented a strategy to prevent major advertisers from doing business with disfavored news outlets. The coordinated effort could have the effect of bankrupting news organizations that don’t get the stamp of approval. “The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative may be acting inconsistent with U.S. antitrust laws and congressional intent by coordinating GARM members’ efforts to demonetize and eliminate disfavored content online,” Jordan wrote in March 27 letter demanding further documents from advertisers... The letters indicate that documents obtained by the committee suggest that the group tried to blackball mainstream conservative news organizations, specifically asking for “communications referring or relating to conservative news outlets, including Fox News, Daily Wire, and Breitbart.” FEC FEC: FEC implements new enforcement case closure procedures .....Effective this month, the Federal Election Commission is adopting new procedures for public disclosure of closed enforcement cases. These new procedures will continue to advance the agency’s disclosure mission by providing the public with access to enforcement case documents once the Commission has closed the file, and it will allow the maximum time for administrative appeals of the Commission’s enforcement decisions. Free Expression Harvard Crimson: Mandatory DEI Statements Are Ideological Pledges of Allegiance. Time to Abandon Them. By Randall L. Kennedy .....At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.” By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom. A closer look at the Bok Center’s page on diversity statements illustrates how… The Bok Center’s how-to page mirrors the expectation that DEI statements will essentially constitute pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else… By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements. I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice. The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince. The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond. Wall Street Journal: Free Speech Is Alive and Well at Vanderbilt University By Daniel Diermeier .....On Tuesday, 27 students transgressed those limits when they forced their way into a closed administrative building, injuring a community-service officer in the process. Students pushed staff members and screamed profanities. Our staff took a graduated approach to de-escalating the situation, including several attempts to discuss the issues with the student group and encourage them to take a different course of action. Over 20 hours, the students were consistently informed that they were violating university policies and warned that they were subject to suspension for doing so. Early the next morning, the Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Magistrate’s Office charged three students with assault. One student protesting outside the building was charged with vandalism after cracking a window. The remaining 25 students left the building voluntarily. The administration suspended all of those students on an interim basis and will all go through a rigorous accountability process to determine further disciplinary action. Critics have claimed that Vanderbilt has abandoned its long-held commitment to free expression. They are wrong. Vanderbilt supports, teaches and defends free expression—but to do so, we must safeguard the environment for it. Students can advocate BDS. That is freedom of expression. But they can’t disrupt university operations during classes, in libraries or on construction sites. The university won’t adopt BDS principles. That’s institutional neutrality. As a community, we should always remember to treat each other with respect and rely on the force of the better argument. That’s civil discourse. Reason: Defending Pornography on Feminist Grounds: A Q&A With Nadine Strossen By Elizabeth Nolan Brown .....[Nadine Strossen:] I've had the opportunity to write about other kinds of controversial expression, including—and again, with scare quotes—so-called "hate speech," so-called "disinformation" or "misinformation," so-called "extremist" speech. And I've come to see that all of these efforts to censor all of these controversial kinds of speech, including pornography, suffer from the same fundamental flaws. All of those flaws emanate from the irreducibly subjective and vague nature of the concept, which means that whoever the enforcing authority is—whether the government, whether individual citizens, as would've happened under the model anti-pornography law that was proposed by the so-called radical feminists—has essentially unfettered discretion to decide what within that inherently elusive and manipulable concept, in this case pornography, is inconsistent with their values. And that means that for the rest of us who disagree with a particular, individual, subjective concept of either sexual speech or hate speech or disinformation, that our freedom and our equality is undermined. Candidates and Campaigns New York Times: An A.I. Researcher Takes On Election Deepfakes By Cade Metz and Tiffany Hsu .....[I]n 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. would accelerate the spread of disinformation online. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat. On Tuesday, the organization released free tools for identifying digital disinformation, with a plan to put them in the hands of journalists, fact checkers and anyone else trying to figure out what is real online. The tools, available from the TrueMedia.org website to anyone approved by the nonprofit, are designed to detect fake and doctored images, audio and video. They review links to media files and quickly determine whether they should be trusted. Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update." The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes and defends the political rights to free speech, press, assembly, and petition guaranteed by the First Amendment. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org. Follow the Institute for Free Speech The Institute for Free Speech | 1150 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 801, Washington, DC 20036 Unsubscribe [email protected] Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice Sent by [email protected]