Not a good week for the White House.

On Wednesday, Iowa Judge Scott J. Beattie threw out the presidential lawsuit alleging “consumer fraud” against pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register. The judge said that allowing the legally “faulty” claims in this suit to proceed could “discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs.”

What was the alleged fraud? Selzer had accurately predicted that Donald Trump would win Iowa in 2016 and in 2020. Her final poll in 2024 showed Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. Trump instead won the Hawkeye State by more than 13 percentage points.

Did an inaccurate poll amount to “consumer fraud”? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defended Selzer, put the First Amendment point plainly – “In America, you don’t lose your First Amendment rights just because your prediction turns out to be wrong.”

On Thursday, a federal court delivered another reminder about press freedom: The White House must provide due process before revoking journalists’ credentials.  

Federal Judge Timothy J. Kelly issued a temporary order to restore White House access for three news outlets – Politico, MS NOW, and CNN. His order lasts 14 days while the court considers whether to grant longer relief. The administration argued in court that national security justified revoking the journalists’ passes without giving them prior notice or opportunity to respond.

“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” Judge Kelly wrote. He noted that prior official complaints had focused on the alleged untruthfulness and negativity of the outlets’ reporting.

As these three news organizations return to work, the court has yet to decide their First Amendment claims. In the meantime, will the administration learn that the momentary frisson of filing a punitive lawsuit is almost always followed by the sharp pain of being slapped down by a judge?
​
These rulings come as the press covers the pageantry of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington. The comparison should be instructive. In the United States, independent courts can check attempts to punish the press. That protection remains perhaps the greatest gift of the Founders – the First Amendment.

Three news organizations – CNN, MS NOW, and Politico – have now been banned from the White House.

The New York Times reports that CNN has retained First Amendment lawyer Ted Boutrous, a sign that a court challenge may be coming. But is this really a violation of the First Amendment?

You can scour the text of the Constitution’s premier amendment without finding a provision that reads, “the right of the press to occupy real estate in the White House complex shall not be abridged.” The president could, if he chose, remove the White House briefing room and restore the indoor swimming pool beneath it.

The rub, however, is that this action targets some news outlets but not others.

Because this action stems from the president’s publicly stated displeasure with the reporting of these news organizations, a legal challenge could have a considerable chance of success. Withholding access on that basis could well be determined by the courts to be viewpoint discrimination – a violation of the First Amendment.
​
The nation’s fourth president recognized that official discomfort with the press is part of the price of a free society. When devising what eventually became the First Amendment, Madison wrote: “The freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”
To be continued…

​The angels may appear to be on the side of ABC in its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, but the devils are in the details.

We’ve followed the Disney-owned corporation’s spirited First Amendment defense against the FCC’s extraordinary decision to subject the broadcast licenses of eight ABC-owned stations to an early review. These licenses are in jeopardy over official ire at the liberal bias of ABC shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live and The View.

Leave it to Thomas Hazlett to tell the rest of the story – that the broadcasters’ regulatory predicament is the result of a trap they helped set for themselves.

Hazlett, a professor of economics at Clemson University and a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission, is a renowned scholar of telecommunications economics and policy. Hazlett writes in The Wall Street Journal that “there’s a loophole” in the First Amendment treatment of broadcasters. Hazlett observes:

“While most media operate in a laissez-faire regime, terrestrial radio and television broadcasting are licensed, and their airwave access has sometimes been deemed a privilege, not a right.”

Hazlett quotes comedian George Carlin, who said that radio and television are “the only two parts of American life not protected by the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’d like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.”

Hazlett points out that the 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language, which opens the door for regulation of broadcasters’ speech, was written by the National Association of Broadcasters. Hazlett concludes:

“The broadcasters traded freedom for free licenses and a lucrative, protected market.”

In the early television age, this regulatory protection shielded legacy broadcasters from new entrants. Hazlett then proceeds to describe how these restrictions were turned on the industry that designed them. In 1973, to cite one example, President Richard Nixon’s political allies challenged the license renewals of two Florida TV stations for failing to meet their “public interest” obligations. It just so happened that both stations were owned by the same company that owned The Washington Post, where two reporters named Woodward and Bernstein were publishing an investigative series about the crimes of the Nixon White House. The Washington Post Company’s stock price plunged 50 percent. Similar intrusions from the FCC occurred under Democratic administrations going back to John F. Kennedy.

We draw two lessons from this history lesson.

First, government overreach – whether in speech, privacy, or other basic rights – is rarely just the story of officials behaving badly, though there is plenty of that. It is often the result of businesses seeking regulatory advantage to boost their competitiveness and handicap their competitors. Many executives and stockholders are shocked when the monster they helped create turns on them.
​
Second, broadcasters might consider a new arrangement with the government. Paying a reasonable market price to secure their spectrum rights might enable broadcasters to control, as Hazlett puts it, both their spectrum and their content.

​This can’t be an easy week for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
 
He sits on a dilemma – one horn being a direct and public request from President Trump to “punish” NBC journalist Kristen Welker, the other being mounting public and Republican criticism of the FCC’s heavy-handed forays into policing broadcast speech.
 
To date, Chairman Carr has followed President Trump’s desire to use the regulatory authority of the Federal Communications Commission to retaliate against media critics.
 
Carr pressured Disney-ABC to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, only to be criticized by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for making a statement to the network (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”) that the senator likened to a mobster’s threat.
 
When Carr opened an investigation into whether the daytime talk show The View improperly gave airtime to Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, he prompted Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) to say that the FCC was exploring the “foothills of violating the First Amendment.”
 
Whatever directives the White House may have given Chairman Carr about these actions in private, there is no mistaking the charge President Trump has now given him in public.
 
Kristen Welker drew the president’s ire by saying on NBC’s Meet the Press that he has had “some mixed results” in his endorsement of Republican candidates. While the president has had extraordinary success in backing his preferred Senate candidates – replacing two incumbent Republican senators with his picks – it is true that he has been far less successful in backing gubernatorial candidates.
 
The president immediately fired back, saying Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for the crime of “purposeful inaccuracy.”
 
The president added on his Truth Social account: “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”
 
And on what basis might the FCC assert authority over the comments of a journalist? The president answered that question: “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves.”
 
This is in keeping with Chairman Carr’s oft-stated rationale for his investigations, predicated on the New Deal-era rules governing broadcasters’ access to public airwaves.
Carr told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said that broadcasters “struck a deal with the American people. You broadcasters get subsidized access, free access to a valuable public resource, the airwaves, worth billions of dollars. In exchange, you have to operate in the public interest.
 
“Look, as a country, we should have a trusted, respected news media, and we’re not there. So I hope more broadcasters return to their public interest obligations.”
Thus, the president’s demand to “punish” and “rebuke” a journalist is clearly based on the theory that the use of public airwaves by broadcasters entitles the government to regulate their reporting until, in the judgment of the government, the news media are “trusted” and “respected.” For decades, the “public interest” obligation has traditionally meant that broadcasters have a general duty to be responsive to local events and needs, avoid obscenity, and give political candidates relatively substantially equal access outside “bona fide news interview programs.”
 
Now the president is proposing to interpret these broad and general obligations into an asserted authority to micromanage speech. Could there be a better example of policing speech than “punishing” a journalist for the relatively mild suggestion that the president’s political endorsements are not always successful?
 
We don’t discount conservative complaints that most corporate news organizations are biased. The best solution to the perception of biased speech has proven to be more speech, creating a market for alternative perspectives in which Fox News has prospered. But regulatory policing of speech is a recipe for authoritarianism.

Conservatives loudly – and as it turned out, correctly – complained that the Biden Administration was shadow-banning and deplatforming them through secret “jawboning” of major social media platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year described in vivid terms to Joe Rogan how White House staffers would scream at him over the phone, demanding that satirical posts about liberals be taken down.

Why on earth, then, are conservatives exploring novel ways for the government to abuse its power to censor content and challenge the First Amendment rights of news organizations? Do they care about the Constitution? And do they lack the imagination to see how these regulatory powers will eventually be employed against them?

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson is one of these pioneers of censorship. He threatened to use Section 5 of the FTC Act, which outlaws deceptive practices, to target social media companies for content decisions as a matter of “consumer protection.” He also targeted Apple News, threatening it over the way it aggregates stories.

For his part, Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has threatened to pull broadcast licenses and to take other retaliatory actions against media companies for their editorial decisions.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is now entering the fray by using the financial interests of the state pension fund to justify a detailed examination of a newspaper’s editorial decisions. The state attorney general is demanding that The New York Times turn over extensive internal documents about its editorial decisions and practices. His 28-page letter seeks evidence of “editorial malpractice.”

The examples Uthmeier cites include recent stories about Israel’s allegedly lurid maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners and the paper’s “downplaying” of the Nazi tattoo worn by former U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner.

General Uthmeier bases his demand on a slender justification: protecting the returns on Florida’s pension-fund investment. The state’s pension fund owns 160,000 shares of Times stock, worth more than $12 million.

Uthmeier states that his concern is financial – looking out for the welfare of Florida pensioners by preventing The Times from making editorial blunders that could result in reputational damage and a massive libel judgment.

But Uthmeier’s action runs the risk of mirroring left-wing shareholder activism that successfully imposed DEI and woke policies on some of America’s leading companies. His approach could erode the First Amendment rights of all Americans.

Does The New York Times have a liberal bias? Do one-legged ducks swim in a circle? One reason The Times is a liberal publication is that it has a mostly liberal following. And the devotion of its readers punctures a sizable hole in Florida’s financial case.

Two weeks ago, The Times reported that it had added 280,000 digital subscribers in the last quarter, for a total digital readership of 13.35 million. Add to that 550,000 print subscribers. The Gray Lady’s total revenue increased 11.2 percent for the three months ending in June. Its operating profit of $155.3 million was up 16.1 percent.

Numbers like these undermine Florida’s concern about protecting the assets of its pensioners from a financial disaster at The New York Times.

We believe that if this demand is pressed in a lawsuit, it is unlikely that any court in America would force The Times to reveal its internal editorial deliberations for scrutiny by a government official.

In fact, legal action might put Florida at risk of violating its own anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits meritless lawsuits filed to chill speech. Since the prevailing party on an anti-SLAPP claim may be awarded reasonable attorney’s fees and costs, such a lawsuit might have the ironic effect of financially harming Florida instead of humbling The New York Times.

But if, by some chance, this strategy should work, don’t be surprised when blue-state officials demand that profitable conservative outlets like Fox News and The Daily Wire also submit to government inspection. That’s just one of many consequences of an anti-constitutional arms race.

Well, that didn’t take very long.

The Trump administration has withdrawn subpoenas demanding that three New York Times reporters reveal information about confidential sources for stories concerning the Qatari-donated presidential aircraft.

That retreat is welcome. But the underlying investigation continues, and prosecutors have left open the possibility of issuing new subpoenas. The episode demonstrates once again why Congress needs to pass the PRESS Act.

The dispute began after The Times reported that President Trump departed Turkey aboard the older Air Force One rather than the Qatari-donated Boeing 747 because the newer aircraft lacked antimissile and other defensive systems. The reporting relied on anonymous sources. But the underlying facts about the plane would have been visible to adversarial nations in photos of the new aircraft.

The government characterized the disclosures as a substantial national-security concern occurring amid hostilities with Iran. Protecting genuinely classified operational information is a legitimate and serious responsibility. Government employees are not free to disclose national-defense secrets merely because a journalist asks.

But the government’s response went far beyond investigating its own personnel. Prosecutors subpoenaed the journalists and sought telephone records belonging to the reporters and some of their relatives. According to NPR, the records sought included those of a reporter’s mother and the spouses of journalists.

At a hearing, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian sharply questioned the government’s handling of the matter. Prosecutors acknowledged that they had failed to notify the reporters about separate demands for their telephone records, as required by Justice Department rules. After roughly 90 minutes of questioning, the government agreed to withdraw the subpoenas, although it reserved the option to try again. Reuters reports that the leak investigation remains active.

Confidential sources are essential to journalism about national security, misconduct, corruption, and abuse of power. If officials can identify those sources by collecting reporters’ communications records – or those of their families – many potential whistleblowers will remain silent.

This episode shows that internal Justice Department policies are not enough. Such policies can be weakened, disregarded, or rewritten by any administration. The bipartisan PRESS Act would establish statutory protections against compelling journalists to disclose confidential sources or surrender sensitive newsgathering records, while retaining carefully drawn exceptions for genuine emergencies.

This legislation is not about favoring The New York Times or shielding unlawful leaks. It is about safeguarding the institutional independence of the American press with limited protections for journalists’ notes and sources.
​
The administration made the right call by withdrawing these subpoenas. Congress should now ensure that the next administration – of either party – cannot so easily turn reporters and their families into investigative targets.

What happens when another government decides for Americans which news organizations deserve be the gatekeepers of the truth?

That is the question raised by a new proposal from the United Kingdom that would require social media platforms to give preferential treatment to media outlets deemed “trustworthy” by standards set in London. This scheme would elevate some news outlets to the top of users’ feeds while relegating independent journalism to a lower tier.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) did not wait long to fire off a letter to U.K. Secretary of State Lisa Nandy. Chairman Jordan warns that the proposal would create a “tiered information system in which media outlets that are supported and legitimized by the British government are at the top, with all other outlets and independent journalists below them.”

He also argues that requiring platforms to make government-approved outlets “prominent” and “easy to find” amounts to “a form of gatekeeping that stifles independent and smaller outlets.”

For Americans, this debate extends well beyond Britain's borders. The companies affected are overwhelmingly American platforms serving hundreds of millions of American users. Changes made to satisfy London would easily reshape what Americans see online.

Protect The 1st has long warned that government officials should never become the arbiters of which speech deserves amplification. The First Amendment rests on a different principle: let the citizen-reader decide.

History repeatedly demonstrates this wisdom of this approach.

Many of the most important stories of the last several years did not originate with large, establishment news organizations. For example, the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was suppressed by major social media platforms in 2020, only to be authenticated over time. Public health skeptics and smaller publications that questioned whether COVID-19 resulted from a laboratory leak were branded as spreaders of “misinformation” before the Biden-era FBI and CIA concluded that a lab leak was a likely explanation for the pandemic.

On the left, Mother Jones revealed in 2015 the dangerous contamination of drinking water in Flint, Michigan, a story long ignored by the mainstream media.

Throughout history, major investigations have often begun with small publications, local reporters, whistleblowers, or journalists working outside the media establishment. Under Britain's proposal, tomorrow’s independent investigative reporter would find it much harder to reach the public simply because he or she lacks a government seal of approval.

Jordan’s letter also highlights another troubling aspect of the proposal.

British officials argue that governments must combat “misinformation and disinformation.” Jordan notes, “European regulators have repeatedly used terms like disinformation and misinformation to exercise greater control over online expression and limit the distribution of politically disfavored speech.” He further warns that the proposal specifically contemplates greater government control over information during “times of social unrest or crisis” – precisely the moments when vigorous public debate is most essential.
​
The solution to bad journalism has never been government-approved journalism. The First Amendment has a superior approach, to trust free people – not governments – to decide whom to believe.

​If you ever had the chance to get close to one of the standard U.S. Air Force Boeing 747s that often fly under the call sign Air Force One, you might have noticed some odd features you wouldn’t find on a commercial airliner.

Strange, iridescent lenses shimmer under the wings. Bulbs protrude from the lower body and wings. Weird antennas stick out here and there.

These are defensive measures meant to protect the president, his staff, and Air Force personnel from aerial assassination. The planes on which the president flies are equipped with infrared sensors that direct lasers to zap incoming missiles, as well as chaff and flare dispensers that can divert heat-seeking missiles away from the plane.

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the new 747, gifted to the administration by Qatar, lacks much of the defensive suite found on the rest of the Air Force One fleet. It has also been reported that the plane is lacking much of the secure communications suite that would be critical in a global emergency.

Many of the new plane’s shortcomings are obvious.

The Times reported: “Different parts of the defensive systems are visible on the old Air Force One, under the wing of the plane and on its tail. They are not observable in photographs of the new Qatari plane.” The Times attributed this observation to an Air Force official who requested anonymity.

The Times also broke the story that President Trump, after attending a summit in Ankara, Turkey, was forced to fly on one of the older Air Force One models at the insistence of the Secret Service. Ankara is little more than an hour’s flight from Turkey’s border with Iran, whose regime has vowed to kill the president in retaliation for his strikes on its leadership.

On Friday, the administration reacted to this story by dispatching federal agents to the homes of four New York Times reporters who produced the story. They delivered subpoenas requiring the journalists to testify about their sources before a federal grand jury on Wednesday.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and press freedom it protects,” The Times quoted its newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, in a statement.

Protect the First’s Take on the Story

As an organization that defends the First Amendment, we find the unusual delivery of subpoenas to the homes of journalists heavy-handed, even goonish.

As this case proceeds, count us skeptical that the four subpoenaed Times reporters revealed information that eluded foreign adversaries. We presume that foreign intelligence analysts can compare photos of the new and older planes. We also presume that foreign intelligence agencies understood exactly why the president was forced to change planes to return home.

This story is a textbook example of why we need a free press to reveal government incompetence and malfeasance. If the president has been flying around the world on an unsafe plane, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent upgrading a Qatari plane that is still unsafe, that is information that the American people need to know.

Legal Jeopardy Remains

From the standpoint of the law, however, the position of the journalists is far from clear. If anything, this ongoing story reveals vulnerabilities in how federal law treats the press.

Under existing law, these reporters might face legal jeopardy if they received classified information about the security details of the plane. It is likely that they will refuse to divulge the names of their sources to the grand jury in New York on Wednesday. And if that happens, they will be subject to imprisonment. If you doubt this, consider the plight of former Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days behind bars.

What we take from this story is the need for a federal law, modeled after those in most U.S. states, that grants journalists limited protection for their confidential sources. The Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression Act is a bipartisan bill that has unanimously passed the U.S. House of Representatives. As with the state statutes, it would shield the confidential sources and notes of reporters from the prying eyes of prosecutors, with reasonable exceptions for emergencies.
​
Passage of the PRESS Act would not grant blanket protection to reporters who divulge classified information that endangers national security. But it would level the playing field, so that the government doesn’t hold all the cards, showing up on reporters’ doorsteps to play the heavy.

​When government officials scrutinize media outlets because they dislike the viewpoints being expressed, Americans of every political persuasion should pay attention.

That is the core message of a new comment filed by Protect The 1st with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding the agency’s unusual decision to revisit a decades-old determination that ABC’s The View qualifies as a “bona fide news interview” program. 

As we noted in an earlier post, the FCC has raised questions about whether The View should continue to enjoy an exemption from federal “equal opportunity” requirements that apply to broadcast candidates. The trigger for this inquiry was The View’s hosting of James Talarico, a liberal Democrat and his party’s nominee for a Texas Senate seat.

In our public comment, PT1st tells the FCC that when it withdraws regulatory approvals over disagreements with a show’s hosts or guests, it crosses a dangerous constitutional line. The Commission would move from regulating technical aspects of broadcasting to becoming an arbiter of acceptable political speech. 

That should worry conservatives as much as liberals.

Today, the target may be a left-leaning daytime talk show. Tomorrow, a progressive administration could use the same precedent against conservative broadcasters, podcasters, or commentators. Once government acquires the power to punish or pressure speakers because of their viewpoints, no ideological camp remains safe for long.

PT1st’s comment emphasizes a simple principle: the First Amendment exists precisely to protect speech that many people dislike. Government officials do not get to decide which viewpoints are sufficiently balanced, neutral, or acceptable to deserve protection. 

Worse, if broadcasters conclude that politically controversial interviews could trigger regulatory scrutiny, many may choose to avoid such programming altogether. The result would be less debate, fewer interviews, and fewer opportunities for voters to hear competing perspectives. Even the threat of government retaliation can chill speech before it occurs. 

Our filing also notes that the media landscape of 2026 bears little resemblance to the one that existed when equal-time rules were first developed. Americans now receive news, commentary, and political information from thousands of sources, including podcasts, streaming platforms, social media, newsletters, and online publications. The View competes in a marketplace crowded with voices from every point on the political spectrum. Consider:
​

• The View, the most popular daytime television show, attracts about 2.5 million viewers.

 

• But more than 16 million people follow podcaster Joe Rogan, whose show on Spotify is not (and should never be) subject to FCC regulation.

While The View featured Senate candidate Talarico, Joe Rogan – with an audience more than six-and-a-half times greater – featured presidential candidate Donald Trump just before the 2024 election. This comparison shows how antiquated New Deal-era laws are, harking back to a time when access to the airwaves had to be rationed because of scarce spectrum.

While broadcast television may lean left, the national cafeteria menu offers plenty of options on the right. The notion that government officials must supervise editorial choices to ensure citizens hear competing viewpoints in this new age of information abundance is risible.

Reasonable people can disagree about The View. Some find it informative. Others find it partisan. Still others may simply change the channel.
​
But in a free society, those decisions belong to viewers holding their remotes, not regulators.

​Amid the recent protests at Newark’s Delaney Hall ICE detention facility, numerous reporters came to document a hunger strike by detainees over conditions inside. As Adam Rose writes in his essay for The Guardian, it was a bad day in a bad week for the First Amendment. To wit:

• An officer declared, “If you are press, you got the opportunity right now – and that’s it – to leave. If you don’t leave out here in an orderly fashion, you are coming with us.”

• He then pointed at someone in the crowd, which was composed mostly of journalists, and declared: "You are not press.”

• The previous Friday, police ordered WNBC reporters out of their vehicle and into a cloud of tear gas that had been deployed against protesters.

• Multiple photojournalists have been injured by police while trying to cover the protests.

It seems that the individual the officer declared by fiat to be a non-journalist was a livestreamer, one of many people at the scene who are playing an increasingly important role in modern journalism. This is especially true as the news divisions of local television stations cut their budgets and reduce news coverage.

Police were apparently unhappy because despite their obvious efforts to block access to traditional crews and cameras, the independents were prevailing. Rose points out that there were five live video feeds near the Delaney Hall protests a few nights earlier and that “none came from traditional TV cameras.”

Multiple livestreaming journalists have been arrested at Delaney Hall. One was injured and taken to a hospital. Three others were held in custody for a day and denied access to counsel. One was handcuffed despite having an ID badge around his neck and a blue vest with “PRESS” emblazoned on it. “Like the injured journalist,” noted Rose, “he was a member of the National Press Photographers Association.” They were all told their credentials hadn’t been “verified,” which is authoritarian-speak for “nothing to see here.”

But there was, as it turns out, quite a bit to see – and film. The injured livestreamer saw two arrested protesters when he was at the hospital, but in the absence of independent cameras, how they came by their injuries – or when – was impossible to determine. Was it during the initial clash with police, or while they were being detained?

The Founders didn’t have video, but they would have understood that the surest way to keep the public from learning how people are treated is to make sure nobody is making a record.
​
A free press isn’t free if it requires the state’s permission to operate. That thoroughly authoritarian impulse was the very one the framers of the First Amendment most wanted to rein in.

A free press depends on the ability of journalists to gather information without fear that the government will seize their records, expose their confidential sources, or use surveillance for fishing expeditions. Recent reports about aggressive Justice Department leak investigations tied to coverage of Iran should remind Congress why passage of the bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying, or PRESS Act, is needed now more than ever. 
 
A Bipartisan Problem
 
The Justice Department is firing off subpoenas right and left to reporters and news organizations over stories involving internal deliberations about Iran policy and military action. Targets of these investigations include The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Axios, and other major outlets. 
 
These subpoenas represent an erosion of principle. For decades, the Justice Department and its prosecutors were cautious about using the law to breach the confidential notes and sources of journalists. That discretion ended in 2009 when the Obama Justice Department investigated a Fox News reporter as a co-conspirator in an alleged violation of the Espionage Act. The Obama Administration also secretly helped itself to the phone records of Associated Press reporters.
 
Not to be outdone, the first Trump administration secretly snooped on the phone records of reporters at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN. The second Trump administration is now, in the words of Andrew McCarthy in National Review, “going to war with the press.” McCarthy writes that the Justice Department is “flexing its muscles to squeeze reporters into giving up their sources, threatening to imprison them if they don’t.” McCarthy, a former prosecutor, offers this “word of caution” for those who oppose this bill. He writes:
 
“The reason press-shield legislation has not gotten traction, even though we’ve always had tension between the public’s security and its need to be informed, is that the DOJ has generally been seen as a responsible arbiter of that tension. Not always, but generally. As the executive branch has become more imperious during the past 20 years, that assumption has eroded. I suspect we’re about to see whether there’s anything left of it.”
 
A Bipartisan Solution
 
The House unanimously passed the PRESS Act in 2024 because lawmakers across the political spectrum recognized that press freedom is not a partisan issue. With the Justice Department under administrations of both the left and the right using national security as a pretext to threaten reporters, bipartisan support for the PRESS Act continues to grow.
 
What would this law do? Just as important, what would it not do?
 
The PRESS Act would prohibit the federal government from compelling journalists and communications providers to disclose protected newsgathering materials, but with reasonable exceptions. It does not grant blanket immunity to journalists. Contrary to some critics, the bill does not shield reporters who commit crimes. It does not prevent investigations into genuine national security threats. It simply requires the government to meet meaningful standards before intruding into the newsgathering process. 
 
Consider that throughout American history, some of the most important reporting on government misconduct, military operations, intelligence failures, and executive overreach has depended on confidential sourcing. Without such protections, many stories of immense public value would never have been published.
 
Congress should not wait for another escalation in the conflict between government secrecy and press freedom. The current controversy surrounding Iran reporting is merely the latest reminder that constitutional protections cannot depend on the goodwill of whichever administration holds power.
 
It is time for the House and the Senate to pass the PRESS Act.​

​We earlier reported on the $3 million payout Marion County, Kansas, made to The Marion County Record after that newspaper was illegally raided by the sheriff’s office and its editor’s home was ransacked. The editor’s distraught 98-year-old mother, a co-owner of the paper, died shortly afterward.
 
Now a county and a sheriff in Tennessee are receiving another expensive lesson – this time to the tune of $835,000 – for holding a retired law enforcement officer in jail for 37 days for posting a meme. Here’s the report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which helped represent the plaintiff, Larry Bushart, in a federal civil rights lawsuit. FIRE reports:
 
“After the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Larry commented on a Facebook post promoting a vigil in nearby Perry County by sharing a meme that accurately quoted Donald Trump’s statement after a school shooting: ‘We have to get over it.’
 
“That meme – which Larry didn’t create or alter – included a reference to the 2024 school shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa. But that did not stop Weems from seeking and obtaining a warrant for Larry’s arrest, based on the absurd notion that the meme could be interpreted as a threat against Perry County High School in Tennessee ...
 
“Weems admitted in a later interview that he knew at the time of the arrest that Larry’s Facebook post was a pre-existing meme that referred to an actual shooting that took place in a different state, over 500 miles away. But Weems and Morrow left out that extremely important context from their warrant application. Not that it should have mattered; the Supreme Court has long held that heated political rhetoric is fully protected by the First Amendment.
 
“Larry spent over a month behind bars on a $2 million bond. Perry County released him from jail only after his plight went viral nationwide and prompted outrage. During his stay in jail, Larry lost his post-retirement job and missed his anniversary – as well as the birth of his grandchild. After his release, he teamed up with FIRE to hold those who violated his constitutional rights accountable.”
 
Kudos to FIRE for helping Bushart stand up to this bullying. As many Americans are being arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights – whether by making controversial posts, reporting public information, or recording the police – they are pushing back in the courts. We hope local officials will learn that trashing their citizens’ First Amendment rights is hard on the résumé and the wallet.

​Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down one of the most consequential administrative-law decisions in decades: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The Court dismantled the Chevron doctrine, under which federal agencies could stretch vague statutes into blank checks for regulatory power. The message from the Court was unmistakable: agencies are not mini-legislatures, and courts must independently determine the limits of agency authority.

This was widely seen as a blow against government bureaucrats expanding their power to enact progressive policies. It is far from clear, however, whether courts will now rely on Loper Bright to rein in the expansion of agency power by so-called conservatives.

As Ed Whelan reports in National Review, judges on the D.C. Circuit are now probing whether the Federal Communications Commission is attempting to evade meaningful judicial review. This case centers on whether the FCC under Loper Bright can manipulate procedural timing and administrative maneuvering to shield its actions on a merger from court scrutiny. Similar – but far more urgent – questions should be tested on another, more fundamental issue:

When will the courts finally rein in the FCC and FTC for abusing the First Amendment? And will Loper Bright help them do it?

These questions arise because these agencies are increasingly acting as though “public interest” regulation includes the power to intimidate, pressure, and discipline disfavored speech.

Consider the FCC’s escalating flirtation with speech regulation. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats over ABC’s broadcast licenses have been invoked to try to force late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Sen. Ted Cruz aptly compared Carr’s rhetoric to a mob threat from Goodfellas: “Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” 

The FCC has no lawful authority to police “bias,” ideological tone, or political content. The First Amendment does not empower bureaucrats to decide whether broadcasters are too liberal, too conservative, too vulgar, too partisan, or too offensive. Indeed, the whole point of the First Amendment is to deny government officials that authority.

And yet the FCC increasingly behaves as though broadcast licenses are contingent on political obedience.

The FTC under Chairman Andrew Ferguson has been moving in a similarly dangerous direction. As we previously reported, the FTC is attempting to weaponize consumer-protection laws against news organizations and media-rating firms whose viewpoints or editorial decisions offend those in power. The FTC’s theory appears to be that editorial judgments can somehow become “deceptive practices” subject to federal oversight.

That is exactly the kind of expansion of agency authority – with no statutory justification – that Loper Bright sought to restrict.

The danger of speech regulation transcends party. Republicans may enjoy seeing pressure applied to progressive media figures today. Democrats may applaud investigations into conservative outlets tomorrow. But once government acquires the habit of regulating speech indirectly through licensing threats, merger leverage, investigations, or administrative harassment, everyone’s freedoms become contingent on who currently controls the bureaucracy.

Fortunately, courts can use the standards of Loper Bright to stop the creation of a permanent administrative state increasingly detached from constitutional limits. This precedent can end the use of the phrase “public interest” as a magical incantation that authorizes speech control.

The FCC was not created to supervise political dialogue. The FTC was not established to referee journalism. Neither agency possesses constitutional authority to pressure Americans into acceptable speech. Nor should courts permit agencies to evade review through procedural gamesmanship, as the D.C. Circuit now appears increasingly skeptical of permitting. 
​
The judiciary has begun reclaiming its role in policing administrative overreach. But reclaiming that role means more than narrowing Chevron deference. It requires judges willing to tell Brendan Carr and Andrew Ferguson that the First Amendment means what it says.

Tragedy was narrowly averted in a park in Miami when a reporter assailed Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava with an impertinent question about $60 million in public funds spent on electric buses that are not working. Fortunately, before the mayor could have been fatally embarrassed in front of a local TV news camera, a valiant plainclothes Miami-Dade County deputy sheriff intervened. Without identifying himself or flashing a badge, he physically confronted the reporter, pushing him backward.

While this incident prevented the impertinent question from being asked, we cannot yet say that the danger of these kinds of confrontations is over. There are an estimated 80,000 reporters, news analysts, and journalists running loose in America, putting all sorts of unpredictable and potentially embarrassing questions to officials about how public funds are being spent, with far too few law enforcement officers on the spot to shut them up by pushing them around and threatening them with arrest.

Can police arrest a journalist simply for asking questions? The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to say “no.”

The plight of journalist Priscilla Villarreal began with her arrest in 2017, with Laredo, Texas, police clearly out to use the law to punish her. She was followed throughout the booking process by police officers, who humiliated her by jeering and snapping pictures of her during the booking process.

What was Villarreal’s crime? She had asked questions.

Under the moniker “La Gordiloca,” Villarreal has amassed a large following for her coverage of events in Laredo on her Facebook page. Her reporting has long irked local officials, from live-streaming Laredo Police Department officers choking an arrestee, to criticizing the Webb County District Attorney for not charging a relative with a crime, despite evidence that the relative had abused animals.

Following up on two stories – a Border Patrol agent who had committed suicide, and family involved in a fatal car crash – Villarreal confirmed the names of these victims with a Laredo Police Department officer before reporting them. Months later, she was charged under a Texas statute forbidding the “misuse of official information.” This law held that it was illegal to solicit information from a public official to obtain a “benefit.”

Under this rubric, any journalist could be charged for seeking to obtain the “benefit” of a scoop.

After a national outcry, these absurd and abusive charges were dropped. But what about the thuggish behavior of the Laredo Police Department? It is often said in law that a right without a remedy is no right at all. Villarreal filed a civil rights lawsuit against the police, seeking damages for her clearly unconstitutional mistreatment.

Villarreal won her case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, only to lose on appeal before the full bench. That court held that the doctrine of qualified immunity, a judge-created doctrine that shields officials from being held liable for constitutional violations, protected the Laredo police. This shield applies unless officials violate “clearly established law.”

Did that not happen?

When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari in Villarreal’s case, the Laredo Police Department got off scot-free. The First Amendment suddenly became not quite as clearly established as we thought it was.

“It should be obvious that this arrest violated the First Amendment,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, calling the Court’s refusal to take up the case “a grave error.”

Judge James Ho, in Villarreal’s initial win, wrote for the court that “if the First Amendment means anything, it surely means that a citizen journalist has the right to ask a public official a question, without fear of being imprisoned.”
​
We have seen time and again, from the raid of a newspaper by police in Kansas, to arbitrary arrests of people peacefully filming ICE officers, a growing appetite to arrest reporters for doing their jobs. It is only a matter of time before an even more egregious abuse of the First Amendment brings a new test to the doctrine of qualified immunity.

We briefly wondered if Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was having a bad day when he threatened ABC if it did not fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he told a podcaster, suggesting the regulatory options available to the FCC to punish the network.

Carr also used his authority over media mergers to force Paramount into paying a $16 million settlement to the Trump library project. Paramount, then seeking to complete a merger, was forced to settle the president’s nuisance complaint against its CBS News division for how it edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Saturday, Chairman Carr left no doubt where he stands on censorship – he is for it and he is the would-be censor. He doubled down by threatening to revoke broadcasters’ licenses if they do not stop the “hoaxes and news distortions” about the Iran war. If they want to stay in the good graces of the FCC, Carr wrote that broadcasters must “correct course” and toe the administration’s line or risk losing access to the airwaves.

One can argue that networks have focused too much on the blowback to U.S. actions against Iran. This is perhaps more of a matter of proximity than of bias. It is much more visually compelling to show an Iranian drone strike on the Dubai International Airport than it is to show a map of Iran with an explosion emoji designating a strike on an Iranian airfield.

It is also true that the media is sometimes sensational and biased. Consider the recent story about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “blowing” millions of dollars on lobsters and steaks. What was left out in many accounts is that the U.S. Department of Defense has made such expenditures for decades – as an occasional morale booster for deployed troops who often subsist on the preserved food of Meals Ready-to-Eat.

All of these are fair points. Similar criticisms can be made about much of the current war coverage.

But would we be better off if these content decisions were made by the FCC? Is the “public interest” standard of the FCC Act too easily defined as the agenda of whichever party is in power? Would officially sanctioned coverage be more objective or trustworthy? Ask the people of Russia, of China, and of Iran.

The threat in Carr’s message is unmistakable. Some of the strongest objections to Carr’s attempts at censorship come from conservatives. Sen. Ted Cruz, who oversees the FCC as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, likened Carr’s statements to a mobster’s threat – “nice bar you have here… it’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

Conservatives, who were victimized by secret acts of censorship by the Biden administration, should be especially wary. If the power of the FCC to punish networks for content becomes institutionalized, Fox News, Newsmax, and other conservative outlets are sure to be targeted by a future Democratic administration.

We expect Russia to crack down on media for spreading “distortions” and undermining national unity. We do not expect to see the idea of licensed speech in America.

Chairman Carr: the First Amendment protects speech that you find disagreeable, biased, or wrong. It exists to protect all speech and a free press. The government does not supervise or license journalism. Period.
​
Conservatives who were righteously angry about the ham-handed jawboning of the Biden administration should be furious about this far-greater abuse of the First Amendment, and the roadmap it creates for future administrations. These breaches of principle, as Sen. Cruz said, “are dangerous as hell.” They are also profoundly un-American.

Censorship is making a comeback as extremists in both parties try to use the mechanisms of government to shut down the bad speech of all those stupid people who just won’t shut the @#%$*& up!
 
On the left, the Biden administration engaged in an official censorship program by deploying 80 FBI agents to secretly jawbone social media companies into shadow-banning and removing conservative content. It also had a State Department program that quietly funded efforts through a London-based NGO to scare off advertisers from conservative news outlets.
 
On the right, Andrew Ferguson, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, apparently determined to leave no bad idea behind, is flirting with censorship by asserting the right of his agency to regulate the editorial decisions of a journalistic enterprise and a media rater.
 
We could credit Ferguson with doing publicly what the Biden administration did secretly. But the brazen, public assertion of FTC authority over private, journalistic enterprises is perhaps the greater danger – one that if accepted by the public and the courts would transform the United States from a First Amendment society into a semi-free, authoritarian country like Hungary.
 
Apple News and Journalistic “Deception”

The previous FTC chair, the progressive Lina Khan, gave a broad interpretation to Section 5 of the FTC Act that empowers the agency to bring legal actions against private actors for “unfair or deceptive practices.” Her predecessors in both parties interpreted this vague authority with modesty, choosing to go after phony claims of cancer cures or the selling of worthless swamp land. Khan used it freely to investigate businesses.
 
But not even Khan asserted that this vague authority gave her the ability to regulate news outlets. That bit of pioneering belongs to Ferguson. He recently fired off a “warning letter” to Apple CEO Tim Cook accusing Apple News of violating its terms of service and the “reasonable consumer expectations of tens of millions of Americans.”
 
Apple News is an aggregator that features content from outlets ranging from Politico to The Wall Street Journal to USA Today. Ferguson accuses Apple News of favoring liberal content while ignoring stories from conservative media – which to be clear, the First Amendment would protect even if true.
 
What about Ferguson’s “terms of service” claim? We pored over the terms of service for Apple News (so you don’t have to) and found that this document eschews any promises about quality, neutrality, balance, or editorial fairness. It’s not even as if its marketing catchphrase is “Fair and Balanced,” or “All the News that’s Fit to Print.” In fact, this document explicitly disclaims responsibility for content accuracy or quality arising from Apple News’s curated, third-party material. And apart from any disclaimer, accusations of editorial slant or an assumed obligation of balance or good judgment ultimately boil down to matters of opinion – of the editors and the readers – not government diktat.
 
Quite simply, Ferguson is attempting to extend consumer protection laws to allow the government to regulate the editorial decisions of a news organization and impose its own editorial slant on organizations it dislikes. That is not consumer protection. It is phony concern about terms of service to promote terms of censorship.
 
FTC Seeks to Ransack the Files of Media Rater
​
The FTC also issued a civil investigative demand related to an antitrust investigation, requiring NewsGuard – a for-profit organization that rates the credibility of news organizations – to produce all its documents. This order includes any documents NewsGuard created or received since its founding in 2018, including reporters’ notes and lists of subscribers.
 
Many conservatives had their suspicions raised when they learned that this business received $25,000 in 2020 from the Pentagon and the State Department to identify hoaxes about COVID-19. On the other hand, as The Wall Street Journal has noted, NewsGuard rates Fox News ahead of MS Now, and National Review above CNN.
 
Of course, even if one thinks it is biased, NewsGuard and its viewpoints are protected by the First Amendment. NewsGuard understandably responded to the FTC’s actions by suing the government for attempted censorship.
 
Regardless of whether you privately agree with Ferguson’s underlying point about overall media bias against conservatives, that is a private opinion for you to make and others to reject. That opinion can control your choices about which media to follow, praise, or criticize, but other individuals get to make those same choices for themselves. Giving the government the means to regulate editorial decisions, and to constrain those choices from on high, guarantees abuse and censorship. Conservatives should be the first to recognize this. If Ferguson’s tactics stick, they will surely be used against conservatives tomorrow just as they are being used against allegedly biased news organizations today.
 
More and more, leaders on the right and the left seem dedicated to living out what Ray Bradbury predicted in 1953 in his dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

​While missiles are flying and bombs detonating in the Middle East, domestic political rhetoric has predictably become progressively more bombastic and incendiary. As in all wars, the First Amendment will be tested by the desire to shut down speech judged to be warmongering, unpatriotic, or just plain stupid.

It was off to the races after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani called President Trump’s strikes on Iran “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” adding: “I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city – you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.”

When we read this we had the same thought as millions of other Americans – yes, they will be safe here. No sanctioned religious police will cuff Iranian-American women about the ears if they appear in public without a headscarf on Lexington Avenue, or rape them in a police station if they are arrested. Iranian-American students, artists, and community leaders need not fear being slowly strangled to death by having a steel cable put around their necks before being lifted into the air by a crane.

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist in New York, shot back at the mayor: “I don’t feel safe in New York listening to someone like you, Mamdani, who sympathizes with the regime that killed more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians in less than 24 hours.”

We would add that if Iran’s ambition to build a nuclear bomb is not arrested, then no New Yorker will be safe. But let us leave that point and examine how the First Amendment comes into this debate.

We predict that before the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington’s Tidal Basin, official threats will be leveled against the speech rights of critics of the attack on Iran. We also expect a few lonely voices in Hollywood, academia, and other centers of monolithic opinion will be hounded, harassed, and threatened if they dare break with the received views of the cultural cognoscenti.

With rhetorical bombs bursting in air, we should keep in mind that the United States has a history of government trying to crack down on “unpatriotic” speech on one side, and violence to end participation in a war on the other. During World War One, the Woodrow Wilson administration secured a 10-year prison sentence against presidential candidate Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party for criticizing America’s entry into that conflict. During the Nixon years, the Weather Underground planted more than two dozen bombs to protest the Vietnam War.

In the face of a new war, we should keep in mind that the First Amendment protects speech that is stupid, false, unpatriotic, warmongering, and ungrounded in fact. The hot exchange between Mayor Mamdani and Alinejad shows that speech and counter-speech can be pointed, polemical, and angry – hallmarks of American political speech since before we were a country – without resorting to laws or mob action to punish the speaker for speaking.
​
President Trump said on Monday that the military action against Iran could last for weeks. As events roll forward, we should keep our emotions in check and respect the speech rights of all – even if we have no respect for what is said.

​When federal agents clamped handcuffs on independent journalist Don Lemon at the Beverly Hills Hotel as he prepared to cover the Grammys, this made-for-headlines arrest immediately raised a serious question: Do journalists enjoy First Amendment protections when they are embedded in an unlawful protest?

Lemon was arrested after covering an anti-ICE demonstration that disrupted a Sunday worship service in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18. This case exposes questions about the constitutional boundaries separating worshippers, protesters, and journalists.

Can you protest during a church service?

The protesters entered Cities Church, shouting “Justice for Renée Good!” This church was apparently targeted because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, heads an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in that city. At least two of these protesters have been arrested, along with Lemon.

A federal indictment naming Lemon and other defendants portrays the protesters entering the church in a “coordinated, takeover-style attack” that caused congregants to flee and children to panic. The indictment claims one protester told two crying children: “Do you know your parents are Nazis? They’re going to burn in hell.”

The protesters might be found guilty of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a federal law from the Clinton era that protects both abortion clinics and churches from interference by protesters. Does the First Amendment, which is the supreme law over any statute, override the statute and protect these protesters on the basis of free speech?

Short answer: No.

Of course, churches are open to all. The protesters had every right to enter, just like anyone else. But if a church official considered them disruptive and told them to leave – and they didn’t – they were trespassing and also possibly guilty of a FACE Act violation. A first offense carries a penalty of up to six months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Wait, how is the FACE Act not a violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause?

If anything, the First Amendment protects the church, not the protesters.

While the “right of expressive association” is not explicitly articulated in the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court has held that this right of expressive association is inherent in the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. And it is likewise inherent in the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. Indeed, if the government were to make a church exception to the enforcement of ordinary trespass laws, that would be blatant discrimination against religion in violation of the free exercise clause.

Think of it this way: How could any group of people, banding together for the same expressive or religious purpose, enjoy any associational and collective speech or religious rights if anyone could storm in and shout them down?

This principle applies to mosques, synagogues, churches, private university classrooms, board meetings, award ceremonies, and even Don Lemon’s online show.

So Lemon is in big trouble, right?

It depends on whether the allegations in the indictment hold up.

The federal government charges that Lemon met with other defendants at a shopping mall to plan the entry into the church. It also alleges that Lemon stood close enough to the pastor to restrict his freedom of movement in an effort to “oppress and intimidate” him. Did he do that, or was it an attempt to interview the pastor that he perceived as an attack?

What we can see online is that Don Lemon went into the service with a camera and interviewed both protesters and worshippers. Walking around a church sanctuary interviewing people is potentially disruptive, but it will take a trial to test the government’s allegations. Did Don Lemon lead or follow the protesters into the church? If he merely followed the protesters, he may have been reporting on a newsworthy disruption, not causing it. But if the government’s portrayal of Lemon being involved in planning the protest is proven, Lemon faces legal jeopardy.

C’mon, Lemon is a left-wing activist himself. Now he’s a “journalist”?

Lemon, who was fired by CNN for alleged rudeness and misogynistic remarks, is no Walter Cronkite. He’s an opinion journalist with a leftward, progressive slant. He is undoubtedly sympathetic to the protesters and their cause. That still makes no difference in this case.

A thought experiment brings home the principle protecting Lemon: Imagine if a Fox News reporter had been at Cities Church to cover the trashing of its service for an outraged audience. That hypothetical reporter’s sympathy in favor of the church would leave no one questioning his First Amendment rights (unless, of course, he was asked to leave and didn’t).

The same applies to Lemon and his sympathies. As long as he didn’t plan the protest – but merely followed up on a tip that there was a story brewing at the church – and did not ignore a proper request to leave the premises, he is likely protected as a journalist.

What will be the practical effects of this arrest?

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Lemon was arrested at her direction, posting: “WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.”

That’s all well and good, with the all-caps warranted. But to convict Lemon, the government will need to prove its allegations.

If the government’s allegations don’t hold up in court, and Lemon is acquitted, it would hard be to imagine a greater gift AG Bondi could have granted a left-wing, web-based, independent journalist than to arrest him as an anti-ICE, free speech martyr in the very epicenter of his progressive base of viewers.
​
What we can definitively say is that the losers will be anyone – including Lemon – properly found guilty of violating the FACE Act. Tip to the protest community: Wrecking a church service is not a good look for you, nor a help to your cause. It’s also against the law.

On January 14, FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and seized her phone, two laptops, and a Garmin watch.

This story has brought the Privacy Protection Act (PPA) of 1980 back into focus. In theory, that law protects journalists from having their notes or “work product” seized unless they themselves are criminal suspects. And while the affidavit has yet to be unsealed, Natanson and The Post were told that they are not targets of the government’s probe. Yet clearly, she is being targeted as if she were a criminal. First Amendment watchdogs are understandably barking mad.

As Chris Cillizza recounts in his concise summation of recent history on the law and past raids on reporters, the PPA has inspired creative ways by administrations of both parties to circumvent it. The government doesn’t like it when a reporter knows more about a crime than the Department of Justice does. In such cases, what’s an administration to do? In the case of Fox News reporter James Rosen, Obama’s Justice Department in 2013 declared Rosen a co-conspirator with an actual criminal in order to confiscate that reporter’s notes. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder later admitted he never suspected Rosen of an actual crime.

To quote Cillizza, after the Obama Administration “stretched the rubber band” on First Amendment press protections, it “never went back.” The First Trump Administration stretched the rubber band some more. So did the Biden Administration. And now the second Trump Administration appears to be giving the method for getting around the law even more elasticity. Gabe Rottman of Reporters Committee has meticulously chronicled the long struggle between free press advocates and these successive administrations.

It is not a tale that inspires hope. Consider how the Department of Justice embraced an internal policy of protecting reporters, only to violate its own policy, then rescind it altogether.

As dysfunctional as the media may sometimes be, it still performs a vital role in national hygiene – bringing to light corruption and malfeasance in government. Time after time, we’ve seen administrations act under the banner of “national security,” when they are in fact seeking primarily to avoid political embarrassment.

This worsening trend in press freedom in recent years suggests that the Privacy Protection Act is an insufficient guarantor of journalistic rights. As aggressive and overreaching as Attorney General Bondi’s move against Natanson was, it is the logical continuation of the policies of the last four presidential administrations.
​
Only by passing the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act – a genuine press shield law – will the feds respect the role of journalists in a First Amendment society.

​A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals denied President Trump’s lawsuit against CNN for saying that his claims about the 2020 election were a “Big Lie.”

What’s the big deal about the Big Lie?

That propaganda term was coined by Adolf Hitler in the 1920s to describe a technique in which many people – who might doubt a small, unfounded accusation – are apt to believe an absurd, outlandish falsehood. Say that your opponent is beholden to special interests, and people shrug. Say that he sacrifices stray dogs to the Roman God Mars, and a surprising number of people will believe it must be true.

Why do some react this way? Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that it is because most people believe that no one “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

So, when CNN ran a story accusing Trump of peddling the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, the president was understandably offended by the comparison. He sued. But was he correct in telling the court that audiences would assume that he was doing exactly what “Hitler did in his monstrous, genocidal crimes against humanity”?

A cursory search shows that the “big lie” trope has been watered down by commonplace usage. During President Trump’s first term, then-Attorney General William Barr described the allegations that Trump’s 2016 victory occurred with an assist from Putin as a “big lie.” Sen. Mitch McConnell, then-Minority Leader, accused Democrats of pushing a “big lie” about Republican proposals for voter IDs. President-elect Joe Biden castigated Sen. Josh Hawley for being “part of the big lie” about the 2020 election.

The term “big lie” might have been defamatory in 1938. By 2025, it has been used so often and so elastically that it has surely lost much of its sting. That is one reason why the appeals court panel ruled:

“To be clear, CNN has never explicitly claimed that Trump’s ‘actions and statements were designed to be, and actually were, variations of those [that] Hitler used to suppress and destroy populations.’”

Two of the three judges were Trump appointees. The judges harked back to failed defamation cases in which one plaintiff was described as a “fascist” and another as “an outspoken proponent of political Marxism.” Courts found that such terms were, in the ruling on the first case, “so debatable, loose and varying that they were insusceptible to proof of truth or falsity.”
​
Courts have long recognized that political speech deserves the widest latitude when it comes to defamation. Politics is not for the easily bruised. Still, with great freedom comes great responsibility. We would all be better off as a country if politicians and journalists alike were to dial back the rhetoric and stick with the facts.

​The University of Alabama shut down two student run-magazines – one for women, one for Black students. Why? The university holds that these publications’ targeting of readers among its 43,000 students constitutes unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

The theory suggests that the university is acting to protect Crimson Tide men who are writhing in pain from their exclusion from Alice, “the University of Alabama’s fashion and lifestyle magazine.” The same can be said for all the white, Asian, and Latino students who are in agony over their exclusion from Nineteen Fifty-Six, a publication dedicated to “Black culture, Black excellence, and Black student experiences.”

In other words, the university is singling out these publications for directing content to women and African-American students, which sounds a lot like – and is – viewpoint discrimination. “You cannot have a more blatant First Amendment violation here,” Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center, told the student-run The Crimson White.

We would add that it would be hard to have a more profoundly stupid violation, either. This ranks up there with the decision by the U.S. Naval Academy to protect its non-Black students by removing Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from its library.

Why is this happening? Universities have an understandable desire to stay on the right side of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. To be fair, DEI ideology and administrative departments had become domineering presences in campus culture and speech, threatening academic careers over faux pas and linguistic misdemeanors. A correction was certainly needed, but we are now veering into overcorrection.

The University of Alabama is acting on its interpretation of a July 29 memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi. That memo included “non-binding suggestions” to help institutions that receive federal funds avoid “unlawful proxies” and “ostensibly neutral criteria that function as substitutes for explicit considerations of race, sex, or other protected characteristics.”

Somehow, that has become a directive to avoid any channelization of communication or free association between Black Americans (12 percent of both the U.S. and the University of Alabama population), and women (51 percent of the U.S. population and 56.5 percent of that university’s population). Taken literally, any lawful interest magazine would have to cater to everyone, of all races, both genders, of all backgrounds, faiths, and national origins. Maybe Fencepost magazine, courtesy of the American Fence Association, fits the bill. (Although some might find its “modern wood designs that keep us coming back” a tad bit risqué.)

The bottom line is that the university’s actions constitute blatant viewpoint discrimination – one of the clearest violations of the First Amendment imaginable.

We draw this conclusion from the U.S. Supreme Court in Rosenberger v. Rector, which slammed the University of Virginia in 1995 for denying standing to a Christian-based student publication. The Court majority’s abiding concern was viewpoint discrimination, not that somehow non-Christians would be discriminated against by the publication’s existence.

A society based on free speech is one that respects pluralism – Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, women, men, gays and non-binary folk, fashionistas, sci-fi geeks, and football fanatics. An effort to enforce an artificial homogeneity is not anti-discriminatory. It is just a new form of discrimination: viewpoint discrimination.
​
We would not be surprised if between the time we post this piece and you read it the university will have listened to its lawyers and reversed these twin cancellations rather than face these students in court. As Nick Saban said, it’s never okay to lose a game.