The past year was the most tumultuous in our history since at least 1968, characterized by a deadly pandemic, economic collapse and a presidential election whose aftermath culminated in a violent insurrection at the Capitol, cheered on — and, arguably, incited — by the losing candidate.
But that wasn’t all. Following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a revived Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets and protested from coast to coast. The response to those protests, and to the movement in general, leads our list of New England Muzzle Awards this year.
Those censorious actions include police brutality against demonstrators in Boston and Worcester who were attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Efforts aimed at banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” about race and gender in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Ending a drug counseling program at a jail in Maine because the organization that runs it had expressed sympathy for Black Lives Matter. Grabbing hundreds of copies of a newspaper from newsstands and burning some of them, as racial justice demonstrators did in Burlington, Vermont.
Other prominent winners include former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who refused to comply with multiple public records requests about an internal investigation of former Boston police officer and union president Patrick Rose, who faces 33 charges linked to sexually abusing young children; retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who hit CNN with a $300 million libel suit that seemed aimed more at intimidation than illumination; and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who all but invited his fans to terrorize two freelance journalists in Maine by falsely claiming they planned to reveal the location of his home in that state.
The New England Muzzles are published around the Fourth of July every year to call attention to outrages against freedom of speech and of the press. They were launched in 1998 at the late, great Boston Phoenix, which ceased publication in 2013. This is the ninth year they have been hosted by GBH News. They take their name from the
Jefferson Muzzles
The envelopes, please.
Boston and Worcester police
Squelching speech by brutalizing peaceful protesters
There were few if any reports of police brutality at local demonstrations last year over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We flattered ourselves that Boston and other New England cities were different, and that the rubber bullets and rough tactics used by police against largely peaceful protesters in other parts of the country couldn’t happen here.
Then, in December, The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization,
published police bodycam videos
In perhaps the most memorable clip, a sergeant is seen and heard bragging about driving his vehicle into the crowd on Tremont Street. Then, when he realizes he’s being recorded, he changes his story. “Oh, no no no no no, what I’m saying is, though, that they were in front, like, I didn’t hit anybody, like, just driving, that’s all,” he says.
Two months later, The Appeal was back with more video from Boston — and from Worcester as well, where bodycam footage captured peaceful protesters being violently
thrown to the pavement
The CJR cited
data from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker
And the fallout continues. Several weeks ago, four of the protesters sued the Boston police and three of its officers in federal court.
According to Universal Hub
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins called the Boston videos “incredibly troubling” and referred the case for further action, The Appeal reported. In a statement, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley told the website: “The inexcusable actions of officers in these disturbing videos make painfully clear why our communities are standing up, speaking out and demanding decisive action to combat the public health crisis that is police brutality in our nation.”
Marty Walsh
The former Boston mayor stonewalls in the notorious Patrick Rose case
It was a shocking arrest that continues to reverberate. Last August, Patrick Rose, a retired Boston police officer and former president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, was arraigned in West Roxbury District Court on
33 charges in connection with sexually abusing six underage children
In April of this year came a stunning follow-up.
The Boston Globe reported
The Globe was able to develop its story despite stonewalling by then-Mayor Marty Walsh, who is now the U.S. Secretary of Labor, and who has richly earned a Muzzle Award. Walsh refused numerous public records requests filed by the Globe starting last October, arguing that those records could not be redacted in a way that would protect the alleged victims’ identities.
Walsh stuck to that refusal even after the state’s supervisor of public records concluded that Walsh was wrong and that Rose’s internal affairs files should be released. That speaks volumes not only about the former mayor’s lack of transparency but about the inadequacies of the state’s public records law, which was
strengthened several years ago
After the Globe’s story was published, Acting Mayor Kim Janey ordered a
partial release
The Rose scandal wasn’t the only police-related mess Walsh left behind. He also appointed a new police commissioner, Dennis White, apparently without any vetting. White became embroiled in domestic-violence allegations (which he and one of his daughters
vigorously deny
But the White matter, at least, will be resolved at some point. The controversy over the way the Rose investigation was handled is likely to result in pain and recriminations for months if not years. Walsh’s attempt to cover up the details was a grotesque violation of his public responsibilities.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha
His embrace of “civil death” strips lifers of rights and dignity
A pair of Rhode Island state prison inmates, both convicted murderers serving life sentences, claim they were injured while behind the walls. One, James Lombardi, says he cut himself on a foot locker that prison officials knew was hazardous. The other, Joshua Davis, alleges that he was given a contaminated insulin shot. They’d both like to sue the state for negligence, but they can’t. Why? Because, according to the state’s 110-year-old “civil death” law, they’re considered “dead in all respects” when it comes to their civil liberties.
The Muzzle for this outrage goes to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, who is defending the state against a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Rhode Island that seeks to overturn the law as unconstitutional.
Defending the state is part of the attorney general’s job. But in a brief that Neronha filed asking that the suit
be tossed out
But there are, in fact, punishments that many would regard as worse than life in prison, or even death. The civil death law at least theoretically enables those punishments. In 2017, the ACLU
sent a letter to then-Gov. Gina Raimondo
According to the
ACLU’s lawsuit
“Plaintiffs face the very real threatened harm of having their civil negligence claims barred by the application of an arguably unconstitutional statute,” Smith wrote.
It’s time for Neronha to withdraw and join 49 other states in conceding that the law is an unconstitutional relic of the past.
Piscataquis (Maine) County Commission
Violating the open meeting law and silencing critics on Zoom
The COVID-19 pandemic posed an enormous challenge to open government, as public meetings were moved from in-person gatherings to Zoom. Few did a worse job of responding to that challenge than the Piscataquis County Commission in Maine, which followed up a likely violation of the open meeting law with a virtual session in which most members of the public were silenced.
According to the Bangor Daily News, the three commissioners
adopted a resolution
Trouble was, the commission didn’t actually meet. Commission Chair James White acknowledged that the resolution was formulated through an exchange of emails and phone calls, with no provision for the public to observe what was going on, as the open meeting law requires.
Shortly thereafter, they met in public to sign the resolution. About a dozen people attended in person while another 100 logged on via Zoom. White reportedly laughed when someone complained that the term “Wuhan Virus” was racist. But when one online participant complained that not enough time had been made for public comment, White
cut off the Zoom call
“The Piscataquis County Commissioners deliberately violated the Maine Freedom of Access Act and struck at the core value of public oversight of government action when they passed a resolution in secret, silenced critical voices, and blocked remote attendees from hearing the proceedings,” Emma Bond, legal director of the ACLU of Maine,
said in a statement
Nor were the county commissioners the only public body to be tripped up by the exigencies of pandemic life. In New Gloucester, Maine,
the Lakes Region Weekly reported
The edit was later restored, and Colby ended up
resigning his post
Plymouth town officials
Trump supporter threatened for his anti-Biden yard signs
The Muzzles wouldn’t be the Muzzles without at least one item about local officials who take it upon themselves to ignore the First Amendment and tell a resident to remove a political sign from their property. This year’s winners are town officials in Plymouth, Massachusetts, who threatened a Trump supporter named Joe Casieri with a $300-a-day fine if he didn’t take down a sign that said “Biden Is Not My President.”
Casieri told NBC Boston
Plymouth Town Manager Melissa Arrighi said in an
interview with 7 News Boston
But after the ACLU of Massachusetts intervened, town officials decided not to enforce the ordinance, which prohibits political signs more than a week after an election as well as those that are offensive.
“Everybody has the right to freedom of speech,” Casieri was quoted as saying. “That’s what this case was about. Everybody has the right whether it’s left, right, middle.”
Whether Casieri likes it or not, Joe Biden is everyone’s president. Casieri is correct, though, about his right to freedom of speech. And now Plymouth officials have learned that lesson as well.
Tucker Carlson
Unleashes his mob on a pair of hapless freelance journalists
One night last July, three members of a terrified family locked themselves in an upstairs room of their home in Maine as someone — apparently more than one — pounded on the door and tried to get in.
“My brother-in-law is a journalist and a news source posted his name on, uh, Tucker Carlson show and his address and things of that nature so he has, um, been getting threats all night long,” said the brother-in-law of Tristan Spinski, a freelance photographer who occasionally gets assignments from The New York Times. Spinski and his wife were there as well. The quote comes from a
911 call
So what happened? Last summer, Tucker Carlson claimed,
falsely
“The threats against the two freelancers came via email, voice mail, etc.,”
wrote Wemple
Carlson has a weird history regarding his privacy in Maine. Two years ago, he
canceled plans
In any case, putting two freelance journalists at risk of bodily harm even though he had been told they had no intention of doxxing him had its intended effect. The story never ran. And though the Times has a well-deserved reputation for resisting intimidation, freelance journalists everywhere were put on notice not to mess with Tucker Carlson.
Donald Trump
The inspiration behind efforts to ban the teaching of racial justice
In Rhode Island, state Reps. Patricia Morgan, George Nardone and Sherry Roberts, all Republicans, introduced a bill that would ban the teaching of
“divisive concepts”
In Dedham, Massachusetts, the high school football coach, David Flynn, complained that one of his seventh-grade daughter’s teachers was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt and teaching critical race theory. (
Flynn is suing
A similar controversy is playing out in Maine, where a Cumberland father named Shawn McBreairty
says he was nearly banned
And in Essex, Vermont, more than 100 people turned out for a public meeting to
denounce critical race theory
Given the multifarious nature of this outpouring of grievance from white people in the face of calls for racial justice, it is difficult, if not impossible, to single out one person to whom to award the Muzzle. But surely former President Donald Trump deserves a large share of the blame. It was Trump who brought racism front and center as a Republican value and who stirred up white backlash during the protests that followed the deadly police shootings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
The objections to teaching racial justice in schools are also largely inspired by Trump, who issued an executive order in September 2020 banning the federal government and contractors from using curriculum “that examined systemic racism, white privilege and other race and gender bias issues,”
USA Today reported
Critical race theory, or CRT, which has become an obsession on Fox News,
can be defined
As a result of Trump’s toxic legacy, Axios reports that Rhode Island and New Hampshire are among
at least nine states
The Oklahoma ban went into effect just as the nation was marking the 100th anniversary of the
Tulsa Race Massacre
Alan Dershowitz
Files an unnecessary libel suit aimed at chilling free expression
A basic principle of libel law holds that public officials and public figures don’t need the sort of robust legal protections granted to private individuals because they have other, more effective ways of fighting back when their reputations are attacked.
“Public officials and public figures usually enjoy significantly greater access to the channels of effective communication, and hence have a more realistic opportunity to counteract false statements than private individuals normally enjoy,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in
Gertz v. Robert Welch
Few public figures are more ubiquitous in the media than retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who is ever-present on cable television and in the op-ed sections of newspapers. So it is fair to speculate that he was seeking to send a message — and an intimidating one at that — when he filed a $300 million libel suit against CNN last September.
Dershowitz’s complaint hinges on how CNN covered his testimony before the Senate in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. Dershowitz said that pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Biden family in order to boost his re-election prospects would not be an impeachable offense as long as he believed that winning would be in the public interest.
The problem was that Dershowitz also said he would make an exception if the actions in question were illegal. According to his lawsuit, CNN edited that out, leading to the network’s commentators to mock Dershowitz and claim he said that the president “could do anything at all — including illegal acts — and be immune from impeachment.”
Dershowitz told The Boston Globe:
But even if you accept Dershowitz’s account, including his allegation of malice on CNN’s part, there were far better ways for him to refute CNN than filing a lawsuit. He could give interviews — like the one he gave the Globe. He could write op-eds. He could hit the cable nets — maybe even CNN, which probably would have been happy to give him a forum if he hadn’t sued them.
In other words, Dershowitz’s suit isn’t about restoring his reputation. He could do that by using the megaphone he already has to tell his side of the story. Rather, it’s about cowing his critics into silence. For someone who’s devoted his career to freedom of speech and civil liberties, his action against CNN is disappointing, to say the least.
Protesters in Burlington, Vermont
Attacking the messenger by destroying hundreds of newspapers
Last September, Seven Days, an alternative weekly newspaper in Burlington, Vermont, published a
lengthy account
“See, what’s happening is a cult,” Marques was quoted as saying. “They think it’s OK to exploit white people, is what’s happening. It’s an exploitation of white people that show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays, wearing black, because those are the big days to show up and pretend that you’re not racist. It’s just a shit show. It’s sickening.”
Not surprisingly, the other organizers were less than pleased. But what happened next was inexcusable.
According to a follow-up story
Seven Days publisher Paula Routly issued a statement in which she said, “The individuals carrying out these retaliatory actions are exhibiting the very authoritarian behavior they are protesting.”
No kidding. In these fraught, polarized times, it might seem quaint to talk about the
“marketplace of ideas,”
But at a time when democracy itself is under attack — mainly from the right, but from elements of the left as well — it’s vital that we all stand up for the free exchange of ideas as the best way to work out our differences. Stealing and destroying newspapers is not the way to do that.
Sheriff Scott Kane
Maine inmates denied drug counseling over a Black Lives Matter dispute
For about eight months, jail inmates in Hancock County, Maine, had no access to opioid counseling, even though substance abuse is rampant among people who find themselves behind bars. The reason? Sheriff Scott Kane had barred the nonprofit organization that provided the counseling, Healthy Acadia, after it issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter in June 2020.
The problem went unnoticed beyond the walls of the jail until January, when the Bangor Daily News
revealed what had happened
“We just don’t do business like that,” Kane was quoted as saying. “I believe no matter what race you are, your life matters.”
After the Daily News’ story was published, the Hancock County Commission condemned Kane’s actions but rejected a resolution asking him to resign,
according to WABI-5
The consequences of Kane’s decision were devastating. Another recovery program that had been identified as willing to step into the breach
proved unable to do so
The agreement called for the two sides to “communicate regularly with mutual respect” and specified that neither side could walk away without giving 30 days’ notice. That should prevent a similar situation arising in the future.
Still, it remains disturbing that inmates were denied drug counseling because of one public official’s objection to a nonprofit’s exercise of free speech on behalf of Black victims of police violence.
GBH News contributor Dan Kennedy has been compiling the New England Muzzle Awards since their debut 24 years ago. His blog, Media Nation, is online at
dankennedy.net