Happy Sunshine Week. Welcome to the annual national celebration of your access to public information.
■ Michigan’s health department is getting sued over its refusal to share information about COVID-19 deaths linked to nursing homes.
■ A Minnesota publisher: Communities that lose their local papers risk a descent into darkness.
■ Free Speech Center Director Ken Paulson suggests ways to hold your government accountable.
An insult to free speech? Critics are condemning a bill Kentucky’s Senate is sending the House—to make a crime of insulting “a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words.”
■ Critics are sounding First Amendment alarms about a Florida bill that would keep Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon from banning political candidates on their platforms.
Comics snip. Ken Paulson views “cancel culture” history through the lens of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury …
‘Under existing law, Trump can’t do anything about it.’ But Harvard Law prof Noah Feldman says the ex-president’s futile attempts to keep the Republican National Committee from using his image “should help us realize that we need an overhaul of how we think of money in politics.”
■ Despite that tension, the party seems to have made its peace with Trump.
‘Some of what gets characterized as cancel culture poses a threat to a free society tolerant of dissent.’ A coalition of U.S. scholars has launched the Academic Freedom Alliance to defend free speech on campus.
■ Columnist George Will: “Students are being harmed by speech-restriction regimes that chill the free flowing of intellectual differences” …
■ … and he cites the case of an evangelical Georgia student who won a round before the U.S. Supreme Court.
■ NPR: The case of a UCLA student charged in the Capitol insurrection highlights tension between the First Amendment and attempts to restrain campus extremism.
‘Feeling really powerful.’ Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri reflects on her acquittal after her arrest while covering a protest last year …
■ … a trial her defenders, including Amnesty International, see as an attack on press freedom and human rights.
■ Commentary in The Daily Iowan: A bill that passed Iowa’s Senate would compromise the right to protest by letting one bad actor render a whole gathering unlawful.
First Amendment doesn’t apply. An American Bar Association fact-check concludes social media platforms are free of such regulation.
■ Wonkette ridicules one of the founders of The Federalist for threatening to sue people who share a tweet mocking him: “Unlike conservatives like Sean Davis, we love free speech and the First Amendment.”