I bore easily. I remember a summer job during my college years. I was doing clerical work for extra spending money. It was easy as pie but I was bored out of my mind. Every hour seemed like a year. I realized there was no way in the world I could ever have a job like this.
The Lord finds a way. I have been running my own small business now for four decades. I have never been bored for one second. Every day presents a new and different challenge.
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “May you live in interesting times.” It’s meant as sort of a curse.
Actually, according to the Great Google, it’s not really a Chinese curse dressed in a proverb’s clothing. The website, Quote Investigator, writes, “The expression can be traced back to the British diplomatic service in China around 1936. Austen Chamberlain, the earliest known person to label the saying a Chinese curse, played a crucial role in its initial dissemination. However, he credited an unnamed member of the British Foreign Service who had served in China.”
(It is, quite frankly, amazing that there now exists a website dedicated solely to quote attribution.)
This is a rambling introduction to the fact that I had a very interesting week last week. I was in the center of a veritable First Amendment firestorm. I spent most of my time being interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, the Daily Beast, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, WLBT, WAPT and on and on.
If you Google “Clarksdale First Amendment Emmerich,” you will find hundreds of articles across the nation about the situation I found myself in the middle of. Talk about hitting a nerve.
When Clarksdale city attorney Melvin Miller told me the city was planning to sue the Clarksdale Press Register for defamation, I tried to warn him. “This is going to blow up in your face,” I told him. “Please don’t do this. It’s just going to embarrass the city.” The city didn’t listen. I was dead on.
I didn’t write the editorial, which was clearly labeled as opinion on our editorial page. Clarksdale Publisher Floyd Ingram wrote the editorial, which criticizes the city for failing to follow the Mississippi open meetings statute.
In fact, I tried to mediate the dispute between Ingram and city, mainly because I have an aversion to paying the $10,000 deductible on our libel policy (and also because I am, by nature, a lover not a fighter.)
As president of a newspaper company, I have dealt with a dozen or so threats of libel over the years. It goes with the territory.
Once, when divulging pending lawsuits with my banker during a financing, I explained we had no pending libel lawsuits. The banker looked up at me and said, “Then you’re not doing your job.”
The easiest ones are the ones that we clearly screwed up, although those are rare. In that case, you admit your mistake, print a retraction and hope that it takes care of it.
I remember once we published a local crime report. We accidentally reported a man who had a traffic fine was arrested for rape. It was a simple transposition error on the part of our compositor. We printed a retraction, paid the guy some money and that was that.
The harder ones are when we didn’t get any facts wrong, but someone didn’t like how we described the facts. Upset, the person will threaten to sue for libel.
State law gives a newspaper a get out of jail free card if you print a correction in a timely manner. But how do you retract something you never said in the first place?
This is where I have invented what I call the non-retraction retraction. It goes something like this: We never said this but if we had said it, we would retract it. Like I said, I don’t like pouring $10,000 down the drain if I can help it.
In the case of this recent Clarksdale incident, the city admitted they didn’t inform the Press Register of the special meeting on raising taxes. But they said it was an honest mistake, not deliberate. We also wrote that the city needed “kick-back from the community” on the tax increase. This was a poor choice of words since “kick back,” which means “feed back” according to every single dictionary, has a slang meaning that has negative connotations.
So I proposed to write a “clarification” explaining these things.
My publisher Floyd Ingram said no way. “There’s nothing defamatory about the editorial. We have to stand our ground and not let the city threaten us and push us around.” He threatened to resign if I forced him to publish it.
“Okay, Floyd,” I said, “Have it your way. You’re right. But you are going to unleash a firestorm that will be a big distraction for me and you.” He said he was prepared for that.
The city sued. The national media picked up on it and the firestorm ensued. I am heartened to realize there are so many First Amendment advocates in our nation willing and ready to defend our First Amendment rights. The response was mind blowing.
The city’s lawsuit is wrong for so many legal reasons, space will not allow me to address them all. For starters, a governmental entity cannot be defamed. Defamation only applies to individuals. And truth is an ultimate defense. And so on.
I might note that you can’t sue Google, X, Facebook or any Internet provider for libel. Section 230 of the Communications Act forbids that. But you can sue traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers all day long. There’s something really, really wrong about that.
As it turns out, the city realized its mistake and changed its mind. The national opprobrium hurled down upon them was a tsunami.
You can read more details below in an editorial written by Tim Kalich, our top editorial writer.
First Amendment doesn’t just protect the media. It protects your right to free speech as much as it protects a newspaper’s right to free speech. This was fight worth taking on.
