It may be hard to keep up with who's suing whom or what--and which lawsuit is still active--without a scorecard: How many lawsuits did Courtney Goodson file in May to keep advertisements off the airwaves? Which ones are still in court and which ones on appeal? Scorecards! Get your scorecards!
We can gather this much from Tuesday's paper: KTHV's lawyers say its free-speech rights were violated back in the primaries when a judge in Pulaski County--namely Chris Piazza--barred the station from running those Judicial Crisis Network ads.
Those who've been paying attention will remember the Judicial Crisis Network. It's a shady outfit with dark and secretive money that runs misleading advertisements on TV during certain campaigns. One sitting justice on the state's Supreme Court, Mrs. Justice Goodson, apparently didn't like being targeted last time around. So, this being America and she being a lawyer, she sued. And got a judge to agree with her--down Pulaski County way, at least.
The court's order to pull the ads is now wending its way through the courts, and is on appeal. The latest news was the TV station's most recent filing, in which it claimed its rights were violated.
We quote the ever-quotable John Tull, an attorney who knows about these things and who filed the latest on behalf of KTHV: "By granting Goodson's request for a preliminary injunction, the Circuit Court silences campaign speech in the critical days before the election."
Even worse, if not overturned, the ruling would set a precedent. Or as Counselor Tull puts it: "Failure to [reverse] will result in a biennial flood of defamation suits from aggrieved political candidates across Arkansas, who will follow Goodson's lead and sue the press to silence speech harmful to their campaign."
Oy. What a mess of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits and appeals and appeals of appeals that would be. All during an election, yet.
The best way we've known to counter misleading speech is with more speech. The folks running Judicial Crisis Network tried to tell the public that Mrs. Justice Goodson, who is doing all right, asked for a raise. When actually the entire court made that request. All the papers said so. And the voters of Arkansas saw through it--enough so that they sent Courtney Goodson to the runoff this November.
There's another Supreme Court, the one in Washington, D.C., that has ruled several times on free speech, even taking up whether lies should be considered such. The nation's top court struck down the Stolen Valor Act in 2012, which punished people for claiming certain military medals or experience. Falsely claiming a Purple Heart or the CMH? Now that's offensive speech.
But to quote Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote on the matter: ". . . criminalizing lies on the campaign trail, tempting as it is, would give the government (and thereby, the incumbent party) an enormous and unprecedented amount of power." Do Americans really want an official Department of Truth deciding what's on TV commercials?
Lesson: When it doubt, side with the First Amendment and the freedom of speech.
Mark Twain once wrote a long-lost essay called "The Privilege of the Grave." Late in life, when his humor was dark at best, he claimed that only the dead had free speech in this country. For they wouldn't be forced to face the consequences: "Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can't print the result. I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family."
At that time in his life, Mr. Clemens was bankrupt, with a string of unsuccessful businesses behind him and family members in the grave. He was losing money faster than he could make it. And dealing with the indignities of growing older. To modern readers, he may have seemed suspect of the American Way by then.
We aren't. Free speech is still one of the most American of ideas. And should stay so.
Judge Piazza's ruling should be overturned--soonest.
Editorial on 08/05/2018