Supreme Court
Wall Street Journal: Supreme Court to Break Tradition, Hold Oral Arguments by Teleconference
By Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall
The Supreme Court, breaking with longstanding tradition because of the coronavirus pandemic, said Monday it will hear oral arguments by teleconference in May, including in cases about the potential disclosure of President Trump’s financial records.
“In keeping with public-health guidance in response to Covid-19, the Justices and counsel will all participate remotely,” the court said in a written statement, adding that it will share more details “as they become available.” The court for the first time will transmit a live audio feed of its sessions, allowing the public to hear the arguments as they unfold.
The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Doe v. Mckesson, 945 F.3d 818 (5th Cir. 2019), directly contravenes the First Amendment’s protection of the rights to organize, assemble, and petition. With no effort to parse unprotected conduct from fully protected speech, the court held the organizer of the protest personally liable for the undirected conduct of another person. That imposition of vicarious liability flouts this Court’s established commitment to broad protections for civil demonstration and strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Indeed, as Judge Willett observed below, under the panel’s analysis even the lead defendant in Claiborne Hardware would not be entitled to First Amendment protection. See Mckesson, 945 F.3d at 842 (Willett, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). The Fifth Circuit’s decision exposing protest organizers to expansive, negligence-based liability undermines our long tradition of civic engagement and ultimately threatens to chill a broad swath of valuable speech.
The First Amendment does not condone physical violence. A police officer was seriously injured here and the Constitution does not excuse his attacker’s criminal, tortious, and morally indefensible conduct, which remains actionable. But our constitutional values are offended when the organizer of a lawful protest who neither committed nor incited tortious action is held vicariously liable for that misconduct. What is at stake here is not the officer’s right to seek redress for his injuries but the First Amendment rights of organizers to use protest to express political and social views.
Media
The Hill: Trump campaign sues TV station over Democratic super PAC ad
By Jonathan Easley
President Trump’s reelection campaign on Monday filed a defamation lawsuit against a Wisconsin television station for running an ad cut by the liberal super PAC Priorities USA alleging the president called the coronavirus a “hoax.”
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages and legal fees from the NBC affiliate, WJFW-NBC of Rhinelander, accusing the station of having “perpetrated a fraud on the public by recklessly broadcasting [Priorities USA’s] defamatory and false advertisement, which WJFW-NBC knew or should have known was produced through the use of technology that depicted a clearly false statement.” …
The ad splices together audio clips of Trump downplaying the virus over a graphic showing the number of cases on the rise.
“The coronavirus, this is their new hoax,” Trump says in the ad. “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. When you have 15 people and within a couple of days is gonna be down to close to zero. We really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand. No, I don’t take responsibility.”
Fact-checkers have said it’s wrong to claim that Trump called the virus a hoax, noting that the president’s full quote shows he was describing Democratic efforts to politicize the virus.
The Hill: CNN cuts away from ‘propaganda’ briefing as Trump plays video hitting press
By Joe Concha
CNN stopped its live coverage of the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing Monday when President Trump began playing a compilation of news clips portraying his handling of the pandemic in a positive light.
“To play a propaganda video at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room is a new – you can insert your favorite word here in this administration,” CNN anchor John King said when the network cut away.
CNN also aired a chyron saying, “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session.”
MSNBC also stopped its live broadcast of the briefing when Trump began airing the campaign-style video that Trump said was put together by White House staff, including social media director Dan Scavino.
“We are cutting into what was not a White House coronavirus briefing,” MSNBC host Ari Melber informed viewers…
The White House video began with text saying, “The media minimized the risk from the start.” It then highlighted various governors thanking the administration for its response to the pandemic…
“It’s very sad when people write false stories,” Trump, who often attacks the media as “fake news,” said after the video ended.
“I would love to be able to say that we have a very honest press,” he added. “And I don’t mind being criticized, but not when they’re wrong, not when people have done such a great job.”
Vox (Recode): What went wrong with the media’s coronavirus coverage?
By Peter Kafka
It’s clear now that the US government was woefully unprepared for the pandemic, and that’s been reflected in its messaging to the public since the start…
Much of the mainstream media amplified this slow and muddled reaction to the rapidly spreading virus. Since alarming reports about Covid-19 began to emerge from China in January, the media often provided information to Americans that later proved to be wrong, or at least inadequate…
As we head into the next phase of the pandemic, and as the stakes mount, it’s worth looking back to ask how the media could have done better as the virus broke out of China and headed to the US…
If you read the stories from that period, not just the headlines, you’ll find that most of the information holding the pieces together comes from authoritative sources you’d want reporters to turn to: experts at institutions like the World Health Organization, the CDC, and academics with real domain knowledge.
The problem, in many cases, was that that information was wrong, or at least incomplete. Which raises the hard question for journalists scrutinizing our performance in recent months: How do we cover a story where neither we nor the experts we turn to know what isn’t yet known? And how do we warn Americans about the full range of potential risks in the world without ringing alarm bells so constantly that they’ll tune us out?
Washington Post: Liberty University’s shameful crackdown on journalists
By Editorial Board
Authoritarians long ago discovered one way to help maintain control and power is to go after journalists who uncover uncomfortable truths and keep the public informed. It is why strongmen in countries such as China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have arrested and jailed a record number of reporters. But it is more than a little jarring to see this tactic of criminalizing journalism being employed in the United States – and by a university whose name celebrates American freedom.
Liberty University sought and obtained arrest warrants on charges of criminal trespassing against two journalists – a freelance photographer for the New York Times and a reporter for ProPublica – involved in stories that chronicled concerns about the decision to keep the Lynchburg, Va., college partially open amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. Campus police investigated the journalists following publication of the critical articles and swore out warrants for Class 1 misdemeanors (punishable by up to a year in jail) that were signed by Virginia Magistrate Kang Lee. It will be up to Lynchburg Commonwealth’s Attorney Bethany A.S. Harrison to decide to prosecute, and she said she hasn’t seen any details on the case…
The charges against the journalists, as Katie Townsend of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said, seem “intended to harass journalists who were simply, and rightly, doing their jobs. . . and to intimidate other reporters from doing the same type of reporting.” Indeed, it is hard to imagine that charges would have been brought had the journalists presented a glowing portrait of the school more to Mr. Falwell’s liking. His efforts – sadly successful – to censor the news and squelch dissent on campus were detailed last year by a former editor of the student newspaper who described a “culture of fear.”
NPR: Bloomberg News Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife
By David Folkenflik
Michael Bloomberg’s short-lived presidential bid reignited a long-simmering dispute over the widespread use of nondisclosure agreements at American corporations – especially at his own.
His namesake company, Bloomberg LP, has used nondisclosure agreements broadly to conceal allegations and silence complaints from employees of sexual harassment or a hostile work environment, as published reports have documented.
The story of one Bloomberg reporter and his wife showcases the widespread use of such legal restraints at the company – and how far their reach can extend.
Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.
Washington Post: The pandemic is killing truth, too
By Jackson Diehl
Truth is the first casualty in war, goes the old saying; the corollary might be that journalists are often the collateral damage. That has probably never been more universally true than in the ongoing battle against the coronavirus. Across the world, both autocratic and democratic governments have responded to the epidemic by restricting information, criminalizing independent reporting and harassing reporters – verbally and sometimes ¬physically.
“Call it the covid-19 crackdown,” says Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. His organization has compiled what he says is a partial list of 200 cases of arrests, threats and harassment related to media coverage of the pandemic. That includes the jailing of journalists in the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Iran, Liberia and Turkey.
No, no one has yet been arrested in the United States; President Trump has limited himself to lobbing insults and smears at the reporters who attend the daily reality show he calls a press briefing. But Trump has given governments around the world a template for suppressing independent journalism about the epidemic: the construct of “fake news.”
At a webinar organized by the Aspen Institute last week, Simon rattled off a long list of countries that have adopted new regulations or laws criminalizing the reporting of “false” information about the epidemic – with governments the arbiters of what that constitutes.
Online Speech Platforms
TechCrunch: Reddit announces updates, including a new subreddit, to increase political ad transparency
By Catherine Shu
Reddit announced an update to its policy for political advertising that will require campaigns to leave comments open on ads for the first 24 hours. The platform also launched a new subreddit, r/RedditPoliticalAds, that will include information about advertisers, targeting, impressions and spending by each campaign.
In a post, Reddit said “we will strongly encourage political advertisers to use this opportunity to engage directly with users in the comments.” The new subreddit will also list all political ad campaigns on Reddit going back to January 1, 2019.
The company said that the latest update and new subreddit are meant to give users a “chance to engage directly and transparently with political advertisers around important political issues, and provide a line of sight into the campaigns and political organizations seeking your attention.”
Reddit’s ad policy already banned deceptive ads and required political ads to be manually reviewed for messaging and creative content. The platform only allows ads from within the United States, at the federal level, which means ads for state and local campaigns are not allowed.
In response to a user who asked if there are measures in place to prevent advertisers from increasing the size of their campaign to reach more users after the 24-hour open comment period is over, Reddit said “that activity will trigger a re-review of the ad and it would result in rejection.”
Politico: Reddit makes political ads more transparent ahead of 2020 election
By Cristiano Lima
Reddit will begin publicly disclosing its political advertisers and how much money they shell out in a new transparency hub, the company said Monday…
Ben Lee, Reddit’s vice president and general counsel, told POLITICO in an interview Monday that the company, which counted 430 million monthly active users at the end of last year, made it a “high priority” to implement the changes prior to the 2020 general election.
“We are trying to come up with a Reddit approach to what’s a pretty challenging debate regarding political ads,” Lee said. “Why we’re making this [change] is basically about two things that are pretty important to us: One is encouraging conversation around political ads and the second is transparency.”
Reddit’s advertising transparency center is part of a wider revamp of the site’s political ad policies, which will now require advertisers to provide additional information to verify their identity and have all of their paid political ads “manually approved by Reddit.” …
The new archive section shows one former Democratic contender dominating all other 2020 political candidates: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. According to a POLITICO review, the Sanders campaign posted more than 170 ads on the platform since January 2019, outpacing any other candidate for federal office during that time period. Sen. Kamala Harris of California bought the second largest number of ads at about 70.
Techdirt: Oncologists Say The Absolute Best Information They’re Getting These Days Comes From Twitter
By Mike Masnick
It’s become sort of a common refrain among many that social media is only good for spreading misinformation and disinformation. I’ve even seen some people claim that social media is to blame for misinformation spreading about COVID-19. This is not to say that such information doesn’t exist, and isn’t being spread, but it ignores how much useful information is being spread as well. Indeed, nearly all of the accurate and more factual information I received concerning COVID-19 came via experts on Twitter, and generally anywhere from a week to nearly a month ahead of “official” reports. While I haven’t seen it officially stated anywhere, I have seen people say that those on Twitter were more likely to quickly embrace social distancing and lockdown, as compared to those not on Twitter.
So it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me to hear, on a recent episode of the Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) podcast, a bunch of oncologists all say that the best information they were receiving was via Twitter. The entire episode is quite interesting… but for the purposes of this post, I wanted to highlight just two short parts. The first one comes starting around 10 minutes in…where they discuss the importance of Twitter, starting with Dr. Green talking about crowdsourcing…
The second mention of Twitter in the podcast is briefer and comes towards the end. They’re discussing how they’re handling clinical trials for various cancer treatments and whether or not they can or should continue, and Dr. Shah notes:
“We are doing an international cancer registry right now on patients with coronavirus. And this was an effort that was largely led through Twitter actually, by recruiting other physicians from other institutions, to capture all this data.”
Candidates and Campaigns
Politico: How Coronavirus Will Blow Up the 2020 Campaign
By Jeff Greenfield
With some kind of social distancing policy possibly in place for months, and no vaccine on the horizon till next year at the earliest, campaign insiders are already asking questions that don’t appear to have any good answers. How do you hold a safe convention, or create a new kind of “virtual” event that accomplishes anything a convention is supposed to do? How do you try to unify a party without being able to bring any of its factions together for face-to-face negotiating? What kind of a campaign can you even run if the key element of a campaign-regular, in-person visits to battleground states-is off the table? How do you mount a “get out the vote” campaign if door-to-door canvassing and sign-up efforts at mass rallies are out of the question? …
Whatever the campaign might come up with-Hollywood dazzle or calm reassurance-one key question is what the broadcast networks will cover…
And what if the two parties take radically different approaches? …
Up until now, networks have been very careful to provide the exact same amount of coverage to both parties. But that has also depended on conventions being more or less parallel events. With any new approach, and especially if the parties take sharply different directions, what they decide to carry, and not carry, could be a critical issue come August.
The States
Albuquerque Journal: Committees emerge as fundraising force
By Dan Boyd
Recently created New Mexico legislative caucus committees that leading lawmakers – both Democrats and Republicans – can use to assist their members have raked in big amounts of money during the last six months…
Despite raising money for his caucus under the new system, House Minority Leaders James Townsend, R-Artesia said he’s not a big fan of it.
“I don’t think it’s good for New Mexico,” he said in a Monday interview. “It certainly concentrates the powers of the purse with leaders.”
Other legislative leaders have a different view of the new caucus committees, as Senate Majority Whip Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, predicted they would mitigate the spending by independent expenditure groups, or super PACs, which have played a prominent role in recent legislative election cycles.
“We’re trying to have some middle ground where we can pay for some administrative expenses without having to use a lot of little PACs,” Stewart said…
“It’s certainly a more open and honest way of doing things,” she added…
The caucus committees are specialized political committees that can collect more cash than other PACs, or individual candidates, and were approved last year after being added into a campaign finance disclosure bill that was signed into law by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
The legislative caucus committees can make unlimited noncash contributions to political campaigns and collect five times more cash per donor – up to $25,000 compared with up to $5,000 – than traditional political committees.
WWL Radio: Governor Brian Kemp Suspends Georgia Anti-Mask Law
By Maria Boynton
Georgia’s anti-mask law is now suspended. The law has been on the books for decades in Georgia. Governor Brian Kemp said during his COVID-19 news conference late Monday, “I signed an order suspending enforcement of Georgia’s anti-mask statute so people can follow the guidance of public health officials without fear of prosecution.”
FlaPol: Why can’t Margaret Good just own her mistake?
By Peter Schorsch
Rep. Margaret Good still won’t confess.
Despite clear evidence, the Sarasota Democrat is brushing away questions and shifting the blame to others over her committee funding a coronavirus town hall.
New Day Florida, an electioneering committee, spent $1,500 for the event.
If she was running for reelection to her seat in the Florida House, that would be fine. But she’s running for Congress, and dollars raised to influence state-level races cannot be used to influence federal ones.
Over the weekend, she told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that the “allegations are off base.”
“I’m affiliated with New Day but it’s not my quote unquote PAC,” she said. “I’m not on the board so I would direct those questions to New Day.”
Problem solved? Not at all.
Her response is as nonsensical as it is brief.
There’s no reason to ask the committee “board” about the spending. Good promoted the event on her official social media accounts. She knew about it and knew who was paying for it well before it took place, probably because it is her “quote unquote PAC.”
New Day Florida isn’t some rogue pot of money that goes around surprising lawmakers with tele-town hall funding. It’s her political committee. It says so on the statement of solicitation she filed when the committee was founded. It says so on its website.
“Persons associated: Margaret Good.”
