First Amendment News

A federal district judge ruled against the actors union and a California law banning the publication of actors’ ages by entertainment employee services if the actors object. The judge said the law violated the First Amendment and would allow states to “forbid publication of virtually any fact.” The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) backed passage of the law to combat age discrimination in the entertainment business. (Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2018, by David Ng) The

Certain news outlets were fooled by white nationalists and coordinated internet trolls into publishing a false claim that the Florida school shooter was a member of an extremist group. The Republic of Florida told the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that Nikolas Cruz was part of their organization. Joan Donovan, a researcher of online fake news, “…called this an instance of ‘source hacking,’ a tactic by which fringe groups coordinate to feed false information to authoritative sources

To evade responsibility for the death of inmates in the county jail, San Diego County asked the court, by way of discovery, to direct a reporter to submit all her notes, documents and interviews, even those unpublished. In attempting this end run, the county ignored the First Amendment and California’s shield laws. The county claimed they had a responsibility to find out the truth so had to gain access to the reporter’s work. The judge

Fearing backroom deal-making, two nonprofits are suing White House aide Jared Kushner’s office for failure to honor Freedom of Information Act requests for details on infrastructure policy. President Donald Trump put Kushner in charge of the new Office of American Innovation that in planning for infrastructure legislation is prioritizing finding private investors over benefits to the public and country. (Newsweek, February 16, 2018, by Jessica Kwong) One of the nonprofits, Food &Water Watch, is concerned

Reporters were  confronted with a disturbing obstacle in trying to cover the shootings at a Florida high school recently. They found themselves the target of false tweets that assumed their identities  and substituted fake text for the originals. Alex Harris of the Miami Herald discovered someone made a fake screen shot of one of her alleged tweets asking for photos of dead bodies or if anyone knew the shooter was white. The assaults escalated to