Biden’s press challenge. Press Watch’s Dan Froomkin: Joe Biden needs to reverse the pre-Trump devolution of the White House press secretary’s job “under both Bush and Obama … into deflecting press inquiries rather than genuinely responding.”
■ The New Yorker’s David Remnick: “Support for press freedoms ought to be a central element of his domestic and foreign policies.” (Photo: Bet_Noire.)
■ Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review: “Biden’s recent record with the press is far from perfect.”
■ New York magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi says she’s dismayed at journalists’ enthusiasm for Biden’s all-female press team: “As we’ve seen repeatedly in the briefing room in the last four years, women in government lie, too.” (Hat-tip to CNN’s Brian Stelter for some of these links.)
‘VOA is clearly a First Amendment institution.’ A federal judge has ordered President Trump’s CEO for global media—overseeing Voice of America and other U.S.-run networks—to stop interfering in their journalists’ day-to-day decisions.
■ Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan has a modest proposal for newly challenged Fox News: “Keep appealing to a right-leaning audience—but commit to doing it within the realm of the truth.”
Holy, ghosts.
■ Free Speech Center director Ken Paulson calls the Supreme Court ruling striking down pandemic restrictions on religious service attendance “an unsurprising result of a poorly drafted restriction.”
■ A company that offers walking tours of supposedly haunted locations in Salem, Mass., says that state’s pandemic restriction on group sizes violates the First Amendment.
Court: ‘Conversion therapy’ = Free speech. A federal appeals court says two Florida counties’ ban on “sexual-orientation change efforts” violates therapists’ First Amendment rights.
■ Friendly Atheist calls the ruling “deeply troubling.”
■ An Ohio professor tells a federal appeals court his university violated the First Amendment when it rebuked him for refusing to use transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
‘Weapons are part of my religion.’ A federal judge holds that the First Amendment protects Wisconsin high school students’ choice to wear pro-gun T-shirts like that one.
■ Law professor David L. Hudson Jr. says the Supreme Court missed a chance to protect off-campus online political speech.
■ Harvard law prof Noah Feldman: Students have free-speech rights that teachers don’t.
■ A workplace lawyer’s counsel for employees: “Keep your social media accounts employer-friendly.”
■ The Drive: “Thank a Slayer fan.”
■ Law & Crime trial analyst Elura Nanos: The case shows California’s attorney general “doesn’t understand First Amendment treatment of ‘hate speech.’”
■ A Black man is suing his homeowners’ association in Florida for demanding that he remove his “Black Lives Matter” flag—but not taking similar action against flags supporting police, sports teams and Trump.