Judge Orders Mississippi Newspaper to Remove Editorial, Alarming Press Advocates

U.S.|Judge Orders Mississippi Newspaper to Remove Editorial, Alarming Press Advocates

A Mississippi judge on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order requested by the city of Clarksdale requiring a local newspaper to remove a critical editorial from its website, a move that alarmed press advocates.

By Wednesday, the newspaper, The Clarksdale Press Register, had removed the editorial from its website. But Wyatt Emmerich, the president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns The Press Register, said he planned to challenge the judge’s order at a hearing next week.

“I’ve been in this business for five decades and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Mr. Emmerich said in an interview, adding that the judge had targeted “an editorial that is pretty plain vanilla, criticizing the City Council for not sending out the appropriate notices.”

The Press Register, which dates to 1865 and serves about 7,750 readers, published the editorial on its website on Feb. 8 under the headline, “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.”

The editorial criticized officials in Clarksdale, a city of about 14,000 residents near the Arkansas border, for what it said was their failure to notify the news media before they held a special meeting on Feb. 4, where they approved a resolution asking the Mississippi Legislature to impose a 2 percent tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.

“This newspaper was never notified,” the editorial read. “We know of no other media organization that was notified.”