■ Veteran telecom lawyer Eric Troutman calls the ruling “a dark day for the First Amendment,” setting the stage for the government to “restrict all speech to everyone so long as it does so evenly.” (Image: Gerhard G./Pixabay.)
■ Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman sees court conservatives applying a rigid view of free speech that could be used to attack government regulation of, for instance, what information appears on drug warning labels (Bloomberg; behind a paywall).
■ Consumer Reports: How to protect yourself from robocalls (April 2019 link).
■ Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Daniels, winner of the 2006 First Amendment Center/Americana Music Association “Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award,” is dead at 83.
Curtain rising on free-speech fight. Movie theater chains are suing New Jersey’s governor, contending they have a First Amendment right to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
■ In a continually updated log, the Free Speech Center is tracking how the pandemic is affecting First Amendment protections—and vice versa.
Seattle media vs. cops. The Seattle Times and four TV stations are opposing a Seattle police subpoena seeking unpublished images from protests May 30.
■ The city calls the subpoena “narrowly tailored,” but it seeks “any and all” images gathered by journalists in a downtown area during a 90-minute afternoon period.
‘Unprecedented violence.’ With student journalists on the front lines of protest coverage, the Student Press Law Center has posted a guide to help young reporters stay safe in the face of police brutality.
■ Lead “winner” in public radio WGBH-FM/Boston’s “New England Muzzle Awards” is a school district that briefly investigated and placed a teacher on leave for telling sixth-grade poetry students some police officers are racist.
Free throws, not all-that-free speech. The National Basketball Association has reportedly agreed to let players replace their names on the back of their jerseys with social justice slogans—but only if those words are on an approved list.
■ The Women’s National Basketball Association will let players wear the names of female victims of racialized violence.
‘The First Amendment is not designed to protect the president from people who disagree with him.’ Columnist and author Ellis Cose says Donald Trump’s rhetoric over the Fourth of July weekend “could have been lifted almost verbatim from the government’s anti-dissident playbook of over 100 years ago.”
■ Professor and book reviewer John Warner calls on the president to stop trying to quash free speech by authors critical of him …
■ … including his niece, psychologist Mary Trump, whose new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, condemns Donald Trump as “incapable of growing” and “unable to regulate his emotions.”
■ The Washington Post: The book portrays the president’s father as “a daunting patriarch who ‘destroyed’ Donald Trump by short-circuiting his ‘ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion.’”
■ The book reveals Mary Trump’s critical role in helping The New York Times win a Pulitzer for its investigation of the president’s taxes.