How local officials retaliate against their hometown newspapers

Two of the most powerful women in the Delhi village of central New York faced off in a brick building on Main Street for what would become a fight over the First Amendment.

It was the fall of 2019. Tina Molé, the highest elected official in Delaware County, demanded that Kim Shepard, the publisher of The Reporter, the local paper, “do something” about what Ms. Molé saw as the newspaper’s unfair reporting about the provincial government.

Mrs. Shepard stood her ground. Not long after, Ms. Molé struck where it would hurt The Reporter the most: the finances. The county stripped the newspaper of a lucrative contract to print public notices, then informed The Reporter that the decision was based in part on “the way your paper covers county affairs.”

The move cost The Reporter about $13,000 a year in revenue — a hefty blow for a newspaper with barely 4,000 subscribers.

In most of the country, state and local laws require public announcements — about town meetings, elections, land sales, and dozens of other routine events — to be published in old-fashioned print newspapers and online, so citizens are aware of matters of public concern. The payments for publishing these messages are among the most stable sources of income left for local newspapers.

However, sometimes government officials revoke contracts in an attempt to punish hometown newspapers for aggressive coverage of local politics.

Such retaliation is not new, but seems to be more common now that terms like “fake news” have become part of the popular lexicon.

In recent years, newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey And California, as well as New York, have been stripped of their public service contracts after publishing articles critical of their local governments. Some states, such as Florida, go even further, to withdraw the requirement that such notices appear in newspapers.

“It’s gotten worse over the years when it comes to using contracts and laws to lash out at newspapers,” said Richard Karpel, executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting transparency in government.

The trend is the latest example of how government officials and wealthy individuals wage war against news organizations that aggressively cover them.

Many politicians, including former President Donald J. Trump, have attempted to delegitimize the mainstream media. Others, such as former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska and former Representative Devin Nunes of California, have filed lawsuits for defamation those courts rejected. In some cases — like the New Hampshire journalist whose house was vandalized following a revelation about a local businessman — the threats have spilled over into the physical realm.

Legal experts said it was illegal for elected officials to arm government contracts. “Under the First Amendment, governments cannot retaliate against anyone based on the positions they put forward on an issue,” said Thomas Hentoff, a partner at the Williams & Connolly law firm who specializes in the First Amendment.

Sometimes it is difficult to prove that a local government is revoking a contract because it is dissatisfied with the coverage in a newspaper. But other times, the rationale was more or less explicit.

For example, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, officials in Custer County, Colo., replaced the longtime director of public health with a man whose educational credentials seemed questionable. The wet mountain stand reported that his academic degree came from an unaccredited university that did not teach classes or conduct written exams.

County commissioners terminated the Tribune’s public service contract and awarded it to a smaller competitor. One commissioner said at a public meeting that he would not support the Tribune because of his “witch hunt” against the director of public health.

The paper’s publisher, Jordan Hedberg, sued the county in the fall for violating the paper’s First Amendment rights. A federal judge encouraged the two sides to negotiate. In December, the county agreed to reinstate The Tribune’s four-year contract and pay the paper $50,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.

For small newspapers, whose budgets can often only cover one or two full-time journalists and a few freelancers, public service contracts are worth thousands of dollars a year and can be the difference between floating or sinking. That’s especially true because many of the newspapers generate meager advertising revenue.

“Savvy governments can use that as a tool to threaten you,” says Alex Shiffer, co-founder of the Shawangunk Journal in Ellenville, NY, which has about 3,000 print and digital subscribers.

Last summer, the city’s school district cancelled the Journal’s public announcement contract after several years complaints about the coverage, including the articles about the district’s poor graduation rate. The public notice is now appearing in a newspaper 30 miles outside of Ellenville.

Mr. Shiffer said the cancellation of the contract cost the Journal about $2,000 a year. “Not a huge drain on our budget by any means, but the damage to citizen engagement was much greater,” he said.

In 2020, The Gaston Gazette, a North Carolina newspaper with a circulation of about 4,000, published an article stating that county commissioners erroneously organized workers’ compensation cases behind closed doors.

The Chairman of the Gaston County Board of Commissioners called the article “another example of where the fake news media is trying to make news instead of reporting the facts.” The county sued the newspaper for libel. Later the suit just dropped said it planned to revoke its public announcement contract, to estimate that the move would cost The Gazette up to $100,000 a year in revenue.

A lawyer for the owner of The Gazette, the Gannett newspaper chain, said in comments to The Charlotte Observer that such a move would be unconstitutional. The province has not acted on its plan to cancel the contract. A spokeswoman for the county declined to comment on this article.

The North Carolina legislature is one of many seeking to relax or end requirements for public notices to be published in physical newspapers. The state has already changed the rule for Guilford Countywhere public notices only need to be displayed on government websites.

The fight in New York’s Delaware County dates back to 2019, when The Reporter covered a series of municipal hearings on the county’s treatment of teens in the juvenile justice system.

below state law, the hearings had to be public. But journalists and other observers at the time told them to sit on one side of a long room, while the participants in the hearings sat on the other side talking quietly, with no microphones or speakers to help the audience hear. The reporter published a letter to the editor about the unusual arrangement.

“I fully dispute that they have been pushed into a corner,” Ms. Molé, the chair of the county’s board of trustees, said in an interview.

In November 2019, The Reporter published an article in which a lawyer for one of the teens alleged that county officials a retroactive document in the case of his client. (Amy Merklen, the county attorney, said the claim was false and the paper did not contact her office for comment before publishing the article.)

One day that fall, Ms. Molé showed up at The Reporter’s downtown Delhi office to meet Ms. Shepard. The women had known each other for decades. Their children had played together. They occasionally saw each other at dinners for the county’s Republican Party, of which they are members.

According to Ms Shepard, Ms Molé complained that the county government was not being portrayed “in a positive light”. She wanted Mrs. Shepard to fire the paper’s editor, Lillian Browne, which Mrs. Shepard said she had refused.

Ms. Molé said she considered some of The Reporter’s coverage unfair and Ms. Shepard simply asked for an impartial report on the county hearings.

The Reporter had published the county’s public records virtually since the paper’s inception in 1881. Last year, however, the Board of Supervisors voted to award the contract to The Hancock Herald, a newspaper that covers a few towns on the southeastern side of the county. , nearly 40 miles away, and has less than half of The Reporter’s circulation of about 4,300.

In March, the province articulated its rationale a letter sent to Mrs. Shepard and her husband and business partner, Randy Shepard, and signed by 38 officials.

“The blatant manipulation of facts and the manner in which your newspaper reports the affairs of the county was one of the reasons the Board of Supervisors chose to change the official county newspaper to The Hancock Herald in 2022,” the letter said. (Ms. Molé said in a recent interview that the decision was really about saving money from the province.)

Some city officials said they disagreed with the decision.

“They claim The Reporter would publish biased articles,” said Wayne Marshfield, who sits on the Board of Supervisors and signed the letter, but said he had only done so to support his colleagues. “I’ve always found it pretty factual, but they claim they don’t, and I think they claim The Reporter wouldn’t publish corrections, although I think they would.”

The shepherds who have defended their coverage of Delaware County, estimate that the loss of the county’s public service announcements cost them $13,000 a year in revenue.

So far the newspaper has not had to cut staff, but the Shepards depend on money they make from things like printing signs, T-shirts and posters to keep The Reporter going. “Once we make a profit in one area, it looks like we’re taking a hit in another,” Ms. Shepard said. They have hired a lawyer and are considering suing the county.

Ms Molé denied that the battle with The Reporter was part of a wider trend of conservatives attacking the media.

“We’re not like the raging lunatic Republicans,” she said. “It’s really not about Republicans or Democrats at this local level. It’s about respect and honesty.”