Lemon pledge / Kari on / Nip and Tuck

Lemon pledge. CNN’s Brian Stelter examined whether the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort in connection with a Minnesota church protest is really a case about chilling journalism. Lemon vowed not to be silenced.
■ Lemon’s arrest has raised questions about First Amendment-protected boundaries inside and outside of a house of worship.
■ Cellphone videographers are now a vital part of the news ecosystem, making Alex Pretti’s murder an attack on press freedom, contends Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Seth Stern.
■ Federal prosecutors cannot review material seized from a Washington Post reporter’s home during an FBI search, a judge has ruled.

■ Alabama has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to end First Amendment protections for panhandling. 

State media? Social media, once viewed as a tool that ordinary citizens could use to counteract the excesses of the powerful, is now helping government suppress dissent, according to a report by Popular Information.
■ TikTok has agreed to settle a landmark social media addiction lawsuit that is set to begin after jury selection this week, the Associated Press reported.
■ Under a new ownership structure in the United States, TikTok is experiencing challenges of censorship claims, technical problems, and app deletions.
■ A ruling in a case involving a student who posted memes of his school principal on Instagram has served to strengthen free-speech protections for Tennessee high schools, asserted journalism professor Mark Harmon in a Tennessee Lookout commentary.

Kari on. While overseeing the Voice of America, Kari Lake’s use of the government-owned network to promote President Trump may be in violation of federal law and policies.
■ Stars and Stripes must maintain its core mission of truth-telling, not present information that flatters authority, argued Rufus Friday, executive director of the Center for Integrity in News Reporting.
■ In a court filing, the Pentagon defended its policy that puts restrictions on news organizations that require them to comply or lose press access.
■ Free speech, “inherently fraught with bias,” needs a reset in America, declared Sheldon H. Jacobson, a computer science professor, in a commentary for The Hill.

A bigger ban. Summer Boismier protested against an Oklahoma book ban, lost her teacher’s license, and is now fighting a legal battle to return someday to the classroom, the New York Times reported.
■ Unsealed court records show that the Trump administration targeted students for criticizing Israel, according to a Mother Jones report.
■ A UMass Amherst student, suspended for protesting on campus, has filed a lawsuit against the university claiming his First Amendment rights were violated.
■ Under state law, the email list of a school superintendent’s newsletter must be made public, the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled.

Nip and Tuck. A new book seeks to explain the unraveling of conservative journalist Tucker Carlson, arguably the most contentious media personality of the Trump age.
■ CBS News chief Bari Weiss told her staff that if the network does not alter its current strategy for delivering the news, “We’re toast.”
■ The USA Today Co. now owns both Detroit newspapers after it acquired the 153-year-old Detroit News and retained its staff.
■ A new court ruling may make it harder for the University of Alabama to defend its reasoning for shutting down two student magazines.

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Finger tip / Being the news / Saving face

Finger tip. The suspension of President Trump’s heckler at a Ford plant visit served as a reminder that free speech can get you into trouble at work.
■ Minnesota’s governor and the Minneapolis mayor are being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly conspiring to impede law enforcement efforts through public statements that they made. Critics say it is retaliation for free speech.
■ Government censorship of free speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses, powered by a full-blown ideological campaign against higher education, reached unprecedented heights in 2025, a new PEN America report has found.

■ A federal judge presiding over a hearing concerning Trump administration detentions denounced cabinet members for “not honoring the First Amendment.”

Control issues. Federal agents in Minneapolis cannot arrest peaceful protesters or use crowd-control tools against them, a federal judge has ruled.
■ Sen. Mark Kelly filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon claiming that attempts to punish and censure him after his participation in a video telling U.S. troops they have the right to resist unlawful orders are “unconstitutional.”
■ President Trump is considering an executive order to bar other networks from showing other college football games during televised coverage of the annual Army-Navy game.

■ The BBC has asked a Florida court to toss out President Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the broadcaster.
■ A jury has found that a Tennessee high-school student’s suspension for sharing memes of his school’s principal on Instagram violated the First Amendment.

Being the news. When CBS News editor Bari Weiss told her producers “We need to be the news,” she succeeded, but not in the way she hoped, according to The New York Times.
■ The White House warned CBS News that if it did not run a Trump interview “in full” it would be sued, The New York Times reported.
■ CBS aired a “60 Minutes” report Sunday on deportations that it had abruptly pulled a month ago.

■ The MAGA plan to take over television is just getting started, according to Jim Rutenberg in an extensive report for The New York Times Magazine.

■ Tennessee prison officials must grant expanded press access to state-run executions, a judge has ruled.

Loyal to a fault? Applicants for jobs with Stars and Stripes are being asked if they agree with Trump administration policies, raising concerns about the news outlet’s editorial independence.
■ Press advocates have condemned the Pentagon’s push to take editorial control of Stars and Stripes.
■ U.S. journalists are facing war-zone conditions covering conflicts here at home, concluded Editor & Publisher in a report.
■ The highly unusual raid on the home of a Washington Post journalist has press-freedom champions worried it could chill future reporting efforts.

■ A professor at the University of Pennsylvania explained in The Conversation why the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s closure exposes a growing threat to democracy.

Saving face. Bowing to pressure, Elon Musk’s X will restrict the ability to use its A.I. chatbot Grok in generating explicit images of real people.
■ A Texas teachers union has sued the state over the “wave of retaliation” against public school employees that included investigations and dismissals over Charlie Kirk-related social media comments.

■ An Alabama public library lost state funding after it refused to move several books deemed “sexually explicit” by the state’s library service board, including The Handmaid’s Tale, out of its teen section.
■ Funding cuts have forced PBS to shut down its weekend newscasts.
■ Cleveland State University is facing a free-speech lawsuit after shutting down its student-run campus radio station.

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Trump-tested / Hordes of haters / Pronouncement?

Trump-tested. A CNN 2025 timeline traced the year that President Trump tested the First Amendment and put protesters, journalists, law firms, and universities in the crosshairs.
■ Last year represented the roughest year for journalists and quite possibly the deadliest as well, according to the Associated Press.

■ Nora Benavidez, a media-policy expert, explained how she found nearly 200 attempts at censorship by the Trump administration in a New York Times essay.
■ Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned American tourists that they may be arrested in Europe for old social media posts, Fox News reported.

Hordes of haters. Technological change historically has been unsettling for a lot of Americans, but A.I. has created a whole new level of fear and loathing, wrote Evan Gorelick for The New York Times.
■ During a CNBC interview, an Israeli billionaire’s call to limit the First Amendment and for democratic nations to take control of social media platforms enraged many conservatives online.
■ In 2026, legal experts anticipate federal judges and the U.S. Supreme Court will confront cases that may alter the boundaries of protected expression in the digital age.
■ Peaceful disagreement is the necessary element for free speech to exist on college campuses, reasoned a University of Illinois professor in a commentary for The Hill.

Pronouncement? Courts across the country have discovered that weighing whether school pronoun policies are constitutional is a complicated issue, USA Today reported.
■ Mandatory anti-racism training violated the First Amendment rights of two Missouri school employees because it required self-censorship, a divided U.S. appeals court has ruled.

■ An appeals court has ruled that the city of Nashua, N.H., violated a couple’s constitutional right to fly a flag on the city’s “Citizen Flag Pole” for a second time.
■ A federal court ruled that a Texas law requiring government contractors to certify that they are not engaged in boycotts of Israel is unconstitutional, thereby protecting the First Amendment right to boycott.

Rebooting CBS. Bari Weiss, the new CBS News editor-in-chief, is embroiled in controversy over her decision-making ahead of the updated “Evening News” rollout, The Guardian reported.
■ Jimmy Kimmel “thanked” Donald Trump and Sam Altman for helping him win the Critics Choice award for best talk show.
■ Betty Boop has joined the list of intellectual property in the public domain as her 95-year U.S. copyright expired.

■ The Freely Fest, a music festival organized by the Freedom Forum to celebrate First Amendment freedoms, is coming to Nashville in April, featuring the Killers, T-Pain, and Janelle Monae.

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ICE capades / No words / Pulling data

ICE capades. This holiday season, church Nativity scenes have become protest sites as parishioners use zip ties, ICE masks and signs to express outrage over immigration raids.

■ After his first year back in office, President Trump has contradicted his commitments to free speech, Brian Stelter contends in a CNN analysis.

■ The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on a Texas book ban that allows local officials to remove from public libraries materials deemed objectionable.
■ Arkansas has become the first state to cut ties with PBS, its public-television station opting to rebrand with more local content as Arkansas TV.
■ Supreme Court justices appeared to back Republicans after hearing oral arguments in a lawsuit over campaign-finance restrictions.

 
No words. In the wake of terminations after Charlie Kirk’s killing, faculty members on college campuses across Appalachia are self-censoring in an effort to please university administrators and the politicians who control funds, WUOT, an NPR affiliate, reported.
■ A new national survey asserting that 90 percent of college undergrads see speech as violence is on shaky ground, says Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.
■ A Turkish student at Tufts University who penned a critical opinion piece in response to her school’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza can resume research and teaching, a federal judge has ruled.
■ A federal judge ordered the University of Florida to reinstate a law student it had expelled for anti-Jewish online posts and research papers.
■ In the fights over the teaching of race and gender in college classes, professors are taking the brunt of the hits, The Hill reported.
 
Pulling data. A Trump administration plan to vet visa applicants’ social media, phone, and email histories is being labeled “censorship pure and simple” by free-speech advocates, The Guardian reported.
■ Are religious charter schools constitutional? Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional-studies scholar, tackled the question that Supreme Court justices recently side-stepped.
■ Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’ social media posts prompt some Democratic county judges to ask for increased courthouse security measures.
■ A speaker with a history of critical and derogatory comments at Orange County board meetings did not have his constitutional rights violated by a language rule, a judge ruled.
 
Who’s the boss? The takeover bid of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery has left the news network in management limbo, the Associated Press reported.
■ Disney announced it would buy a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, making it the first major Hollywood company to collaborate with an artificial intelligence firm.
■ An Oregon judge blocked a Trump administration proposal to criminalize loud noise during protests outside federal buildings.
■ Journalists shared their experiences covering immigration enforcement in a climate of fear with the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
■ John Noble Wilford, a New York Times reporter who covered the 1969 moon landing, has died at 92.

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Laying track / Beet it / Mags tagged

Laying track. The Trump administration’s new website that supposedly tracks media bias while offering up a “hall of shame” is simply a desperate gimmick, posited Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian. 
■ Major news outlets have hammered back at the White House over accusations of journalistic misconduct published in the administration’s new searchable webpage.
■ Citing First Amendment rights, The New York Times has sued the Pentagon over its press-access restrictions, arguing that they are unlawful and unconstitutional.

■ An ICE-tracking app developer has sued Attorney General Pam Bondi, claiming she censored his free speech by pressuring Apple to remove it.

■ The Trump administration is formally cracking down on issuing visas to fact checkers and content moderators.

Balancing act. Incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be facing a First Amendment challenge of protecting both free-speech rights of protesters and the religious-freedom rights of the city’s Jewish population.
■ The U.S. Supreme Court could revive a First Amendment suit from a sidewalk preacher who broke a Mississippi city’s protest ordinance by shouting at concertgoers.
■ Court Justices likely will side with abortion opponents in a First Amendment challenge to a New Jersey investigation into whether a faith-based pregnancy center misled people to discourage abortions.
■ The Justice Department has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to block an immigration judge’s free-speech lawsuit that may have consequences for federal workers.

Beet it. In the wake of a lawsuit by the First Amendment Coalition, a California county board of supervisors has agreed not to pursue a subpoena that sought the identities of anonymous critics on Facebook.
■ Concluding that X had violated its digital rulebook concerning misinformation and hate speech, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s social media app the equivalent of $140 million.
■ In the wake of controversies surrounding the death of Charlie Kirk, it is important to remember that free speech is a constitutional principle, not a conditional privilege, explained professor and sociologist Samuel J. Abrams.
■ Book publishers are challenging Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett’s orders to audit children’s collections and eliminate books that deal with gender identity.

Mags tagged. The University of Alabama has suspended publication of separate student-run magazines for black and female students, saying the two were not compliant with federal DEI guidance.
■ American teens overwhelmingly dislike and distrust news media, according to results of a survey conducted by the News Literacy Project.
■ One-time “CBS Evening News” anchor Connie Chung condemned her former employer in an interview, declaring that greed has caused the network to “crash into crumbles.”
■ House Rep. Jamie Raskin has demanded that CBS News provide more information about how it edited a “60 Minutes” interview with President Trump.
■ Nonprofit news outlets fear that selling ads would jeopardize their tax-exempt status, but IRS records show that is rarely the case.

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Let's be frank / Order up / Worth what?

Let’s be frank. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Trump called a reporter “piggy” because of his frankness.
■ Donald Trump’s “piggy” insult is stoking more outrage than usual, wrote Rachel Leingang in analysis published in The Guardian.

■ The Oval Office media access fight between Trump and The Associated Press is being argued in a federal appeals court.

■ The executive editor of The Associated Press explained in an editorial why the news organization is standing up for every American’s right to speak freely.

Order up. A federal judge ruled that a UFO-inspired burger stand mural in Salina, Kan., is protected under the First Amendment.
■ Attempts to hang the Ten Commandments in Texas public schools have created a clash of beliefs among parents, teachers, and students.
■ The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a religious-liberty dispute over the broadcasting of a pregame prayer through a stadium loudspeaker at a Christian school in Florida. It left intact the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals finding that the state High School Athletic Association’s use of the speaker constituted government speech and that the school’s rights were not violated.

■ NPR has settled its legal dispute with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for $36 million after it accused the CPB of bowing to pressure from President Trump to cut off its funding.

■ A California climate-related financial reporting law that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce claimed violated companies’ First Amendment rights was paused by a U.S. appeals court.

NYC’s new AOC. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has quickly become the top target of conservative media, and the attacks are drawing comparisons to Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
■ The MAGA-sphere had trouble processing the Mamdani-Trump White House meeting on podcasts and social media feeds.

■ Federal prosecutors now want to make it illegal to possess anarchist magazines and pamphlets, declared the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s director of advocacy in The Intercept.

■ The undermining of public libraries by Tennessee’s secretary of state is misguided and unnecessary, contended Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

Worth what? Two months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination a government-backed campaign has led to firings, suspensions, and other actions against more than 600 people who believed they were exercising their First Amendment rights.
■ Florida officials have defended taking action against public employees for comments in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing.
■ Authorities in Tennessee have dropped a felony charge against a man who was jailed for more than a month for a Facebook post.

■ A University of Virginia professor examined in The Conversation how free-speech protections collided with paranoia over communist infiltration during the Red Scare.

Getting chummy. Jeffrey Epstein emails have shed new light on the delicate relationship between reporters and their sources, the Associated Press reported.

■ A Kansas small-town newspaper that was subjected to a controversial raid by law enforcement officers in 2023 has received an apology and a $3 million judgment.

■ Freelance journalists and protesters have sued the Trump administration claiming federal officers’ use of force at a Portland, Ore., rally violated their First Amendment rights.
■ Covering the activities of ICE agents in Los Angeles has meant huge risks for independent reporters, according to the Los Angeles Public Press.

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Fear 101 / Half empty / Hard-pressed

Fear 101. Potentially lawless hardball tactics against California universities by the Trump administration is affecting free speech on campuses, a federal judge has determined.
■ Citing “protected speech” under the First Amendment, a federal jury in Virginia has acquitted a man who used social media posts to call for President Trump’s assassination.
■ A woman who distributed leaflets disclosing the home address of White House official Stephen Miller has found herself investigated by law enforcement agencies and mired in a First Amendment battle.

■ A federal appeals court sided with a parents’ group and ruled that an Ohio school district cannot enforce its gender-pronoun policy.

Force out. An extensive injunction that would restrict federal agents’ use of force against protesters and reporters was issued by a federal judge in Chicago.
■ As federal prosecutors take a hard line against protesters in Los Angeles, nearly 20 percent of their charges have been dismissed or resulted in acquittals, NBC News reported.
■ An Arab-American group has sued the state of California over a new antisemitism law that it says violates free-speech rights.
■ The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a former Kentucky official who sought to overturn the high court’s 2015 same-sex marriage ruling.

Half empty. More than half of the Americans who responded to a new poll said the Trump administration is not committed to protecting constitutional rights and freedoms.
■ The unwanted change to out-of-office emails of Education Department employees blaming Democrats for the government shutdown by Trump administration officials was a violation of their First Amendment rights, a federal judge ruled.
■ After a much-publicized censorship battle, a fired Indiana University student newspaper adviser has filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming the dismissal violated his constitutional rights.
■ A professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has filed a First Amendment lawsuit stemming from her suspension over comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.
■ Citing political pressure around a Charlie Kirk social media post, a dismissed dean has sued Middle Tennessee State University.

Hard-pressed. Conservative activist Laura Loomer, who routinely has been called out for making false claims, announced that she was granted a press credential to work in the Pentagon.
■ A North Carolina GOP spokesperson, citing ties to President Trump, allegedly made attempts to persuade news outlet ProPublica to not publish a story on a prominent state judge, The Washington Post reported.

■ Top officials at the British Broadcasting Corp. have resigned over evidence that a documentary on President Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech in Washington included some misleadingly edited clips.
■ The White House has barred reporters from accessing the West Wing office of Trump administration communications staff.
■ Sen. Ted Cruz blasted “frightened” Republicans for not condemning Tucker Carlson over his podcast interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

No laughing matter. Donald Trump’s list of hosts serving late-night “illegal” comedy continues to grow, as does concern for free-speech defenders, suggested MSNBC’s Steve Benen.
■ The Washington Post has examined newly appointed editor in chief Bari Weiss’ first month of running CBS News.
■ With the online video and posted transcript of the full 73-minute interview with President Trump on “60 Minutes,” viewers caught a rare look inside the news show’s editing process.
■ A consortium of news outlets has made a legal challenge to Tennessee’s restrictions on press access to state executions.

■ An online news service has been launched in Nashville where young journalists will shine a light on current events that are relevant to their peers.

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Closing openness / Press on / Exxcused?

Closing openness. President Donald Trump’s anti-woke AI agenda poses a serious First Amendment threat, Vanderbilt University free-speech advocates warned in an opinion piece for MSNBC.
■ A new study has found that as chatbots surge in popularity, and more Americans use the services to get their news, an alarming amount of their content is false.
■ With “No Kings” marches held nationwide, more than 7 million Americans used their First Amendment rights to defend those same rights, ACLU’s Ellen Flenniken opined.
■ President Trump’s media mockery of the “No Kings” protests only proved the protesters’ point, reported CNN’s Stephen Collinson.
■ Labeling it a violation of the First Amendment, a trio of labor unions has sued the Trump administration over the monitoring of visa holders’ social media posts.

Press on. Former senior White House correspondent Brian Karem wondered if journalists could stop the Trump administration from staging the news and telling reporters how to present it in a recent Salon commentary.
■ Biden-era press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lashed out at her successor, Karoline Leavitt, over her “inappropriate” exchanges with reporters.
■ Dozens of journalists turned in their access badges and departed the Pentagon rather than agree to new government-imposed restrictions on reporting.
■ Calling it the opposite of freedom of the press, former Fox News reporter and host Bill O’Reilly harshly criticized the Pentagon’s press restrictions.

■ U.S. immigration authorities detained a British journalist on a speaking tour and revoked his visa, Reuters reported.

Open sale-ing. The future of CNN is uncertain as Warner Bros. Discovery has announced it is welcoming bidders that are intent on buying the media conglomerate.
■ PBS and NPR stations are using old and new ways to raise money in the wake of Congress’ $1.1 billion federal funding cut.

■ Students for Life of America has proposed making the late Charlie Kirk’s birthday a national holiday honoring free speech, Fox News reported.
■ Religious freedom is the next First Amendment target of President Trump, declared Rev. Nathan Empsall in a Newsweek commentary.
■ Oklahoma’s new superintendent of public schools has rescinded his predecessor’s mandate to place Bibles in classrooms.

Exxcused? Exxon Mobil has sued the state of California over a pair of climate-related financial disclosure laws the company says violate its First Amendment rights.
■ A federal judge has declared that a Texas law requiring booksellers and publishers to rate their books based on sexual content is unconstitutional.
■ A man has sued Washington, D.C.’s police department and the National Guard after being detained and handcuffed for playing the Darth Vader theme from “Star Wars” while following officers patrolling neighborhoods in the nation’s capital.
■ A federal appeals court has ruled that a Michigan school’s 2022 decision to ban “Let’s Go Brandon” clothing did not violate students' First Amendment rights.

Paper crumbling. An already beleaguered news industry has seen 136 newspapers shut down in the last year, expanding the nation’s news deserts, according to a report from Northwestern University.
■ Defying an administrative order to leave news stories out of a homecoming edition of Indiana University’s student newspaper has cost its faculty adviser his job. But others are pushing back.
■ The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press raised more than $2 million while honoring several leaders in media law and journalism.
■ National Public Radio’s “founding mother” Susan Stamberg, the first female broadcaster to host a national news program, has died at age 87.

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Burn marks / Acting up / Pontificating

Burn marks. President Trump boasted that he “took the freedom of speech away” from those that burn the American flag.
■ Trump’s claim that flag burning is now illegal ignores that it is protected under the First Amendment.

■ The Associated Press has objected to false claims President Trump made about the ongoing legal dispute over proposed press restrictions to White House events.

■ A federal judge fired off a 161-page rebuke of President Trump over his administration’s attempts to bypass the First Amendment and deport pro-Palestinian academics.

The way it is. CBS News, once revered for fact-based reporting, appears to be embracing right-wing journalism, Popular Information has reported.
■ Paramount has bought Bari Weiss’ news and commentary website and named her the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.
■ After widespread pushback from news organizations, the Pentagon announced it had relaxed its press restrictions.
■ By trying to censor the press, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was orchestrating an attack on the First Amendment.

Acting up. Jane Fonda has resurrected the Committee for the First Amendment, a Hollywood organization that fought suppression and blacklists, reinvigorating the industry’s free-speech crusaders.
■ A Tennessee teacher who was fired over posts about Charlie Kirk has filed a lawsuit to get her job back.
■ Jimmy Kimmel showed media companies that late-night television was not irrelevant, NPR’s Eric Deggans explained.
■ American comics in Saudi Arabia used a global festival to skewer the free-speech debate raging in the United States.
■ Analyzing users’ own data, The Washington Post reported how TikTok keeps folks scrolling for hours every day.

Library bookings? As Arkansas works to save a book-censorship law that would allow jailing librarians and booksellers, the First Amendment prohibits it, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explained.
■ A Florida district court rejected a First Amendment argument in a school library book-removal lawsuit.

■ A library director in Wyoming fired in books dispute will receive a $700,000 settlement.
■ The Knight Institute, a First Amendment legal organization at Columbia University, has taken on the Trump administration when the university will not.
■ Federal agents need to dial back on aggressive tactics against journalists and protesters in Chicago, a judge has ordered.

Pontificating. Pope Leo defended journalism in a speech where he said that reporting is “a right that must be protected.”
■ Public trust in media has reached a new low, results of a Gallup poll revealed.
■ Assaults on journalists have grown to more than 100 this year, according to data from U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
■ Belva Davis, the first black woman hired as a TV reporter on the West Coast who overcame hostility and career obstacles, has died at 92.

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Rising up / Down shift / Pledge fight

Rising up. In a much-hyped return to his ABC late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel became an unexpected hero of free speech, declared The Hollywood Reporter.
■ Beyond Kimmel, there is a bigger struggle between free speech and the Federal Communications Commission, concluded Tom Wheeler, a visiting fellow with the Brookings Institution. 

■ President Trump made claims that critical TV coverage of him is “illegal” and not protected by free-speech rights.
■ The push from the FCC and the Trump administration to revoke broadcaster licenses for expressed on-air views they dislike could run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court.
■ FCC Chair Brendan Carr now has targeted ABC’s “The View,” questioning its qualification as a bona fide news program.

Dismissals challenged. Educators who were fired for social media comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk have filed First Amendment lawsuits challenging their terminations.

■ Tennessee employers quick to fire employees over social media posts could use more restraint when dealing with First Amendment matters, a Vanderbilt University professor wrote in a recent commentary.

■ Foreign adversaries, including Russia and China, spread disinformation online about America devolving into civil war only hours after the Charlie Kirk shooting, the Associated Press reported.
■ CNN examined the U.S. Supreme Court precedents that the Trump administration’s targeting of “hate speech” would violate.
■ Harvard University’s court victory over President Trump’s threat to cancel billions of dollars in research funding for the school was a win for the First Amendment as well.

Down shift. Remember when Donald Trump and Elon Musk pledged free-speech absolutism? Apparently, they don’t, according to a CNN analysis.
■ Judges have pushed back on Trump administration efforts to test the durability of the First Amendment this year.
■ The FBI agent who was fired for sending anti-Trump texts has lost his First Amendment case to get his job back.

■ A federal judge has overturned parts of a Florida bill banning books, saying it violates students’ First Amendment right of free access to ideas.

Pledge fight. News outlets have geared up to do battle with the Pentagon over reporting restrictions being demanded by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
■ Calling the complaint “tedious and burdensome,” a federal judge dismissed President Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.
■ The media must stop firing black journalists whose voices are vital to democracy, asserted commenter and podcaster Perry Bacon in a New Republic commentary.
■ The deportation of an Atlanta journalist detained by ICE can proceed, an immigration appeals court ruled.
■ Struggling to pay its bills after federal government funding cuts, NPR reported that it has plans to cut millions from its annual budget.

TikTakeover? Pending federal approval, tech giants, including Oracle, will handle the oversight of TikTok security and algorithms under a new U.S.-China deal.
■ Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie said he had the needed petition signatures to force a House vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

■ A new petition law in Florida may jeopardize November ballot measures on Medicaid expansion and recreational marijuana.
■ Tennessee has appealed a 2024 court decision that essentially blocked a state “abortion trafficking” law from taking effect.

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