The press bites back: Organization sues Trump to protect media from unconstitutional restrictions
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PEN America is a New York nonprofit dedicated to promoting creative expression and defending the rights upon which it’s predicated: freedoms of speech and press. Its members range from journalistic to literary to media professionals. There’s no shortageThe press bites back: Organization sues Trump to protect media from unconstitutional restrictions
PEN America is a New York nonprofit dedicated to promoting creative expression and defending the rights upon which it’s predicated: freedoms of speech and press. Its members range from journalistic to literary to media professionals. There’s no shortage of issues for the organization to tackle, especially now, but PEN’s “bedrock work” is “long-term advocacy on behalf of individual writers who are being punished because of their work.” They take exception to Trump’s war against the press. Represented by Protect Democracy and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, PEN America is moving beyond criticism to legal complaint. They’re asking a federal district court, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to declare Trump’s retaliatory actions unconstitutional under the First Amendment and to block Trump from retaliating or directing retaliation against someone based on their speech. Their challenge is meaningful, as the organization was founded in 1948. It’s also nonpartisan. PEN “forcefully raised concerns about free expression infringements during the Obama, Bush, and other prior administrations.” Trump’s not even the first president PEN has sued. It’s a pretty complaint. PEN takes care to catalogue Trump’s verbal attacks on the press (“disgusting,” etc.), then notes that these comments, while anti-democratic, are not the basis for this suit. The problem is, they point out, that he has threatened to engage, and he has engaged, in conduct intended to retaliate against specific news organizations and journalists he disagrees with. PEN says Trump’s retaliatory measures against Amazon—motivated by a desire to strike at founder Jeff Bezos, also owner of the Washington Post—have included criticizing Amazon in a way that affected its stock, telling USPS to re-evaluate its rates for Amazon, and personally directing the head of USPS to double rates for Amazon and its ilk. Trump has also openly referred to his vendetta against CNN. Read more