Mississippi City Stuns Newspaper With Restraining Order Over Editorial

A Mississippi judge ordered a local newspaper to take down an editorial criticizing its mayor and city council Tuesday, in a move that has alarmed free-speech advocates across the country and aggravated a years-long feud between the paper and the city’s mayor.

The city of Clarksdale, Mississippi, filed a defamation lawsuit against the Clarksdale Press Register following the publication of a Feb. 8 editorial that criticized the city’s Democratic mayor, Chuck Espy, and the city council for holding a meeting about a proposed tax on marijuana, alcohol and tobacco products without alerting the media.

In their complaint, city leaders said they were “chilled and hindered” in their efforts to lobby for the tax in the state capital “due to libelous assertions and statements” made in the article.

Judge Crystal Wise Martin of the Chancery Court of Hinds County granted the city’s request for a temporary restraining order Tuesday, ordering the editorial be removed.

“The injury in this case is defamation against public figures through actual malice in reckless disregard of the truth and interferes with their legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality during this current legislative cycle,” Martin wrote.

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“It’s kind of bizarre,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns the Press Register.

According to Emmerich, Clarksdale’s mayor and the publisher of the Press Register, Floyd Ingram, have been at odds for years, after Ingram broke a 2021 story about city leaders giving themselves and other city employees substantial pay raises. Anger over the pay bumps — which made Espy one of Mississippi’s highest-paid mayors — fell largely along racial lines in Clarksdale, a majority-Black city in the Delta, with White residents voicing greater opposition to the decision, the Clarion Ledger reported.

In 2023, the local NAACP chapter called on Clarksdale citizens to boycott the paper, alleging racist business practices. (Ingram referred questions to Emmerich. Espy’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The editorial the Clarksdale city government is now suing over is, “to me, a plain-vanilla article criticizing a government organization when they’re not transparent,” Emmerich said. “And, you know, they felt like that was defamatory and libelous.”

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The editorial, which can no longer be found on the Press Register’s site but was included in the city’s court filings, questioned Espy’s commitment to being “open” and “transparent.”

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Wise’s order is “extraordinary … and almost certainly unconstitutional” on several levels, said David D. Cole, a Georgetown Law professor and former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The First Amendment “virtually categorically prohibits” prior restraint on speech — that is, preventing or removing the offending speech before its legality is decided in court, Cole explained. {snip}

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[Editor’s Note: Here are the judge and mayor.]