Mississippi Opens the Playbook for Dismantling a Free Press
Slow-moving lawsuits intended to drain newsrooms of their limited financial resources and editorial bandwidth. Threats of jail time for journalists who expose political corruption and refuse to give up their sources and turn over their notes. Judges with close ties to the politicians who have attacked reporters and their coverage.
If you think these things sound outlandish in America, take a close look at what’s happening here in Mississippi. All these possibilities are the subject of very serious conversations I’m having this week with my colleagues as the editor in chief of Mississippi Today, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the state’s politics.
A former governor of our state — a central subject of our Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting — filed a motion on Tuesday asking a judge to find our newsroom in contempt of court because we refused to turn over our notes and sources to him. Breaching the confidentiality of sources violates one of the most sacred trusts — and breaks one of the most vital tools — in investigative journalism. No serious news organization would agree to this demand.
As boisterous leaders like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida work consciously to erode First Amendment protections, the use of a defamation lawsuit against small but energetic newsrooms like ours could become a political playbook for an attack on the American free press. In the 1964 case The New York Times Company v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court made it harder for public officials to win defamation cases, forcing them to prove that actual malice occurred, but the time and costs of a yearslong lawsuit over actual malice would threaten our newsroom’s financial livelihood. Even if we were to prevail in our defense of this suit, we will probably have lost in many other ways.
If we’re forced to spend our limited resources on legal fees to defend a meritless lawsuit, that’s less money we can devote to the costly investigative journalism that often is the only way taxpayers and voters learn about how their leaders truly behave when they believe no one is watching.
A former Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, operating within a state judicial system he helped build, is using a defamation lawsuit to try to obtain access to our editorial notes, internal communications and names of our sources. His lawsuit does not challenge the accuracy of the reporting, but Mr. Bryant has made clear he wants everything we’ve got related to our acclaimed investigation that revealed the depths of his involvement in the state’s welfare scandal.
