First Amendment News

The Federal Communications Commission agreed to pay $43,000 for attorney fees and court costs of a New York journalist seeking records on net neutrality proceedings in 2017. The records that reporter Jason Prechtel received under the settlement showed how millions of fake comments were sent to the FCC during the net neutrality rollback. (Gizmodo, March 21, 2019, by Dell Cameron) The New York attorney general’s office is still investigating the case but has already found

The U.S. Army intended to charge an the Environmental Working Group (EWG) nearly  $300,000 to see results of water tests for a contaminant at military installations. A dangerous chemical in firefighting foam was thought to be present in 401 sites, and 24 military drinking water systems around the world tallied unsafe levels of the chemical called perfluoroalkl or PFAS linked to cancer and other health problems. (U.S.News & World Report, March 20, 2019, by Ellen

March 21, 2019 by donal brown The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected HomeAway and Airbnb’s First Amendment argument in upholding Santa Monica’s ordinance that bans home stays unless a resident is present. The ordinance also prohibits rentals of entire homes for less than 30 days. (San Francisco Chronicle, March 13, 2019, by Carolyn Said) The rental companies argued that the town was curtailing  commercial speech protected by the First Amendment. The court ruled that since the conduct

March 21, 2019 by donal brown In response to President Donald Trump’s repeated assaults on journalists, Democratic congressmen introduced an act to make it a federal crime to cause bodily injury to a journalist. (My Record-Journal, March 14, 2019, by Mary Ellen Godin) Just last month, as Trump incited his followers in the El Paso rally, a supporter yelled “F— the media” and shoved a BBC cameraman. The Saudi Arabia murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi

Congress passed two transparency reforms recently, one a success and the second a failure. The first required disclosure of campaign finance reports for U.S. Senate candidates. House candidates were required to file electronic reports. Senate candidates all chose to file paper reports delaying public access and costing the government $900,00 annually to convert the files. The second reform was aimed at stopping dark money groups from skirting Federal Election Commission guidelines that require groups spending