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The Columbus Dispatch and staff members won 20 awards at the Ohio Associated Press Media Editors Awards on Sunday for work in 2022, including first place awards for public service, best daily sports section, best digital project and best spot news coverage.

Dispatch reporter Cole Behrens won the APME's Rising Star-Newspaper award which recognizes achievement and ability by an individual with five years or less experience in journalism during the awards ceremony held Sunday at the Villa Milano Banquet & Conference Center in Columbus.

"Every day our journalists, our photojournalists, and digital staff work to provide the kind of journalism worthy of your time and investment, said Edwina Blackwell Clark, executive editor of The Dispatch. These awards are recognition of their great work and a result of our commitment to this community.

The Dispatch staff, led by public safety reporter Bethany Bruner and members of the Dispatch/USA Today Network Ohio Statehouse bureau, won first place for Best Public Service for 10-year-old rape victim and new Ohio abortion law."

The Dispatch won first place for Best Daily Sports Section for a collection of the staff's work.

Erica Thompson, features editor, and Dispatch staff won first place for best digital project with "Gone But Not Forgotten: The legacy of Black-owned businesses in Driving Park."

Dispatch staff members won first- and third-place awards for Best Spot News Coverage. The first-place award was for "Ohio State president suddenly resigns," and the third-place award went to business reporter Mark Williams for coverage of AEP blackouts.

Dispatch.com, led by Michelle Everhart-Sullivan, managing editor-digital, won second place for Best Digital Presence.

Photojournalist Fred Squillante won two second-place awards, one for Best Photographer, and the other for Best Photo Story for The Homeless of Heer Park." Third place in that latter category was won by photojournalist Barbara J. Perenic for "Body Painter."

Jose D. Enriquez III won second place for Best Illustration or Informational Graphic for a front-page graphic on guns in schools, and also won second place with fellow designer Aja Diffin for Best Front Page Design.

Other award-winners in the statewide competition for 2022 work were:

Amelia Robinson, Dispatch opinion and community engagement editor, second place, Best Editorial Writer; Bethany Bruner, second place, Best News Writer; Adam Jardy, second place, Best Sports Feature Writer; Laura Bischoff, second place, Best Investigative Reporting for "Ohio youth prison system struggles with violence, staff vacancies;" Ceili Doyle, second place, Best Feature Writer; Bailey Johnson, third place, Best Sports Writer; Bill Rabinowitz, third place, Best Sports Enterprise for his profile on Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud; Sports staff, third place, Best Special Sports Section for "Ohio Stadium Turns 100;" and Courtney Hergesheimer, third place, Best Video for "Burning House."

The Dispatch also won a third-place award for general excellence competing in Division V, which represents the largest newspapers in Ohio.

The reporters behind the Dispatch's Preying on Patients series Max Filby, Mike Wagner and Jennifer Smola Shafferwere awarded the Society of Professional Journalists Central Ohio chapter's First Amendment Award. The series investigated the operation of the State Medical Board of Ohio and doctors who sexually abused and harassed patients for decades. The SPJ recognition is the chapter's top honor, and is awarded for work thatis "vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable."

The Dispatch sports staff won the coveted Associated Press Sports Editor (ASPE) Triple Crown award, finishing in the top 10 nationally in three of these categories: print portfolio, digital, event coverage and projects. Only nine media outlets nationally accomplished the fete.

The sports staff was recognized by the ASPE with Top 10 designations for digital coverage, print section, projects ("Ohio Stadium at 100"), special section (a commemoration of Rick Nash), and action and feature sports photos by photojournalist Adam Cairns.

Dispatch reporter Danae King was honored by the Ohio Association for Justice, with its 2023 Outstanding Journalist Award for her work in 2022 building asexual abuse database of priests in the Columbus diocese who have been accused of sexual abuse of children.

"... I wanted those survivors and others to be able to find our when and where accused priests worked," King said.

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Dispatch wins 20 awards in Ohio Associated Press Media Editors ... - The Columbus Dispatch

A book-banning bill that passed the Indiana General Assembly had the support of local lawmakers even as critics warned of alarming consequences.

Under the banner of protecting Hoosier schoolchildren from harmful material, Indianas lawmakers fashioned a Pandoras box. Legislation passed in the just-concluded session makes every item in every school library subject to potential challenge for virtually any reason.

The astonishingly poorly crafted House Enrolled Act 1447 signed into law by Gov. Eric Holcomb on Thursday allows anyone in the community to file a complaint if they think something in a school library is harmful to a minor or obscene. HEA1447 then requires the school board to review the request at the next public meeting.

You dont have to be Magellan to know where this is heading.

Books dealing with LGBTQ themes or those that provide an unfiltered view of race relations or other aspects of this countrys sometimes troubled history already have been canceled by self-serving politicians around the country. People who have convinced themselves that they know best feel newly empowered to restrict what everyones kids can read.

A story by The Republics Andy East last week shared the views of local parents, school officials and many others about this bill, which is part of a nationwide effort. Raymond Haberski, professor of history and director of American studies at IUPUI, who is part of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Studies, said this last October:

Banning these books or having them removed from libraries is simply another way to say that these groups oppose the way people are, their identities. Instead of coming out and being bigoted to peoples faces, theyre going after the books in libraries and saying that those books exist or if my children come across them, somehow, theyre going to be hurt by them, which basically means that theyre saying that children would be hurt by simply living in the same community with people who are not necessarily like them. To me, that is incredibly disturbing.

As an institution that stands for the First Amendment, we have tirelessly advocated against this kind of dangerous legislation. We are not lawyers, but we can see the First Amendment violations in HEA1447. We wont be surprised to see a court nullify it.

Having said that, the legislation does have a silver lining. Recall we mentioned that HEA1447 requires the school board to review book-ban requests at the next public meeting?

After this bill takes effect Jan. 1, we intend to track these requests and report who is challenging books in our community, and why, and what your elected school board members are doing about it. We intend to shine light on every effort to ban books under this law.

Would-be book banners never seem to grasp a basic concept: When they try to ban books, it simply spurs greater interest. Well give oft-banned (and wildly popular) author Steven King the last word:

What I tell kids is dont get mad (about censorship), get even. Run, dont walk, to the first library you can find, and read what theyre trying to keep out of your eyes. Read what theyre trying to keep out of your brains. Because thats exactly what you need to know.

Continue reading here:
Editorial: Book-banning bill has unintended consequences - The Republic

Natalie Behring, Special to the Daily Herald

While Americas Freedom Festival in Provo officially began Thursday with a day of prayer, the festivals annual return is most felt with Hope of America. The three-day event brings together hundreds of elementary-ages students from Utah County and beyond to perform in a thousands-strong chorus singing patriotic tunes.

In 2023, like years past, the children will be present and ready to sing on Tuesday night. As they have done before, the national Freedom from Religion Foundation released a letter last week decrying the use of public school time and attention prepare for the festival, which they call a religious concert.

Lawyers for the Freedom Festival disagree and will continue the event as planned. Bill Fillmore, an attorney representing the Freedom Festival, sent a letter to FFRF on Friday in response to the complaint. While he and his law firm, Fillmore Spencer, only represent the festival, the letter stated it was sent with the approval of the Superintendents and legal counsel for each of the Provo School District, Nebo School District and Alpine School District.

In its initial complaint, FFRF questioned the use of school time to prepare for the festival due to the overtly Christian prayer opening 2022s event and religious overtones in several pieces of music, along with the events location. Hope of America is traditionally held at the Marriott Center on Brigham Young Universitys campus.

The location complaint was disputed due to logistics the location has nothing to do with the universitys affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Fillmore wrote, but because its the only facility in the county large enough for the expected attendance.

In response to FFRFs other complaints, lawyers argued that references to God in songs are incidental and that participating students do so voluntarily and pursuant to writtenparental consents.

Lawyers also responded to what they call blatant misrepresentations by the group, including reemphasizing the assertion that teachers and students participate voluntarily and that Although some school resources may be involved, it is dishonest to misrepresent that a vast amount of public school resources are spent annually in preparation for HOA.

Disagreements continue over Supreme Court precedent regarding public acknowledgments of religion in society. FFRF cites a series of cases including School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp, which ruled mandatory Bible readings in school unconstitutional, and Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, which ruled a policy allowing student-delivered prayers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Fillmore responded that the groups citations applied to in-school and school-sponsored events, as opposed to a public schools ability to facilitate or participate in community events that themselves involve prayer or other religious expression.

In turn, they cite recent cases Kennedyv.Bremerton School District, allowing a high school football coach to lead Christian prayers after games, and The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, allowing Christian crosses to be placed in public spaces.

FFRF has taken umbrage with the Freedom Festival over the event in recent years. Jim Evans, executive director of Americas Freedom Festival, told the Daily Herald last week the group was looking at our previous responses in prior years to see if updates were necessary to their response. In addition to seeking that the Freedom From Religion Foundation immediately cease and desist hereafter from any such recklessly false and defamatory public statements, the lawyers threatened potential future recourse.

If it becomes necessary, FFRF will be held accountable for any damages suffered and all attorneys fees incurred in enforcing or defending our rights under the First Amendment, the letter reads.

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Freedom Festival responds to criticism of student involvement by ... - Daily Herald

Tucker, GA The Tucker City Council meets May 8 and will hold a first read and public hearing about the nondiscrimination ordinance thats been discussed for years.

Supporters and opponents plan to attend the meeting and speak during public comments. The city council meeting will begin at 7 p.m. and be held at Tucker City Hall, located at 1975 Lakeside Pkwy, Ste 350B, Tucker, GA 30084. The meeting will also be streamed via Zoom. To see the Zoom link, click here.

Getting an NDO passed has been a years-long effort that has met with resistance, notably from Mayor Auman.

I have serious reservations about trying to use the force of law to bring about the change wed like to see on this matter, Auman said back in 2021. My concerns include the fact that such a law is outside our purview, it creates division instead of unity, and it will lead to all sorts of needless, expensive legal action by and among our citizens.

Councilmember Anne Lerner announced an NDO working group back in April 2022. That came six months after Mayor Auman and city council members supported a resolution for an inclusive, fair and welcoming city. Supporters of the ordinance said that the resolution was not legally enforceable.

Tucker Open Door, a local civic group, has been placing pressure on the city to adopt the ordinance, which is similar to ordinances adopted in other cities like Doraville, Decatur, Clarkston, Chamblee, Dunwoody, and Brookhaven.

In a message to its members before Mondays meeting, Tucker Open Door said, After working for 3+ years with Tucker Open Door on a non-discrimination ordinance, it will finally be on the agenda for a first read on May 8th! We welcome your presence and support during the City Council meeting. Public comments and emails in support of the ordinance will be critical as we work to get this passed. Lets get it done.

Rehoboth Baptist Church emailed church members on May 5, encouraging them to attend the meeting to speak against the ordinance out of concern it would infringe on peoples religious freedom.

I am bringing this matter to your attention because the proposed Non-Discrimination Ordinance will violate the First Amendment rights of all people of faith and all faith entities, Pastor Troy Bush wrote in the email. I have met repeatedly with members of our city council who have been drafting this ordinance, and I have shared these concerns.

The ordinance itself creates legal definitions in the city code for age, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and veteran. It declares that people have a right to be free from discrimination regarding seeking or keeping employment, enjoying public accommodations, obtaining housing, and being free from retaliation for exercising those rights.

The ordinance does carve out 10 exceptions, some of which cover religious organizations. It also provides a process for enforcing the ordinance.

Under the NDO, the city can enforce the ordinance, but its a lengthy process.

People who want to file a complaint about ordinance violations can file them with the city clerk using a form provided by the city. Complainants will be required to pay a $50 filing fee. The city clerk would notify the chief judge of the citys municipal court, who would appoint a hearing officer from a list of hearing officers appointed by the city in the same way that the city appoints members of its boards.

The hearing officer can dismiss a complaint if the complainant has filed a separate complaint with a state or federal agency alleging the same facts. If the complaint makes a claim that violates state or federal law, the hearing officer will refer the complaint to those agencies and dismiss the complaint. The city clerk will have to serve the target of the complaint within seven days of the complaint being filed. The respondent will have 30 days to answer the complaint but will not be obligated to respond. If the complaint is allowed to proceed, the city will also offer up to six hours of free mediation services to resolve a complaint before holding a hearing. If the complaint results in a hearing, and the accused is found to have violated the citys ordinance, there will be a fine of $500 for the first violation and a fine of up to $1,000 for each subsequent violation.

No such finding or penalty shall in any way be considered to be a criminal conviction, the ordinance says.

The hearing officer may also request corrective action in addition to or in lieu of a fine.

Parties found to have violated the ordinance may appeal within 30 days to the Superior Court of DeKalb County.

To read the draft of the non-discrimination ordinance, click here.

Writer Logan C. Ritchie contributed reporting to this story.

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After years of discussion, Tucker City Council will consider ... - Decaturish.com

In the late 1980s, the fortunes of Nick Navarro, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, were on the rise. Elected in 1984 and on his way to nearly tripling his agencys budget, he was also demonstrating a flair for dealing with the mediaP. T. Barnum with a Cuban accent, said one South Florida defense lawyer. Navarro and his office starred in the inaugural season of Cops, the pioneering Fox reality-TV series, and made national news by clashing with the rap star Luther Campbellincluding having him arrestedfor sexually explicit lyrics on albums by Campbells 2 Live Crew.

Navarros relations with the media werent universally cordial, however, and spawned a constitutional challenge that may now have profound implications for another publicity-loving Florida politician, Governor Ron DeSantis: It exposes one of DeSantiss most recent high-profile gambits as a brazen violation of the First Amendment.

On November 17, 1988, a Fort Lauderdale daily, The Broward Review, ran a front-page article that Sheriff Navarro found especially vexing. It was headlined Navarro Failed to Act on Corruption Warnings, with the subhead Broward Sheriff didnt pursue reports that a Bahamian cocaine trafficker was bribing his deputies.

The story was the latest in a series the Review had run criticizing the Broward sheriffs office, the countys largest law-enforcement agency, and Navarro was fed up. The morning it appeared, he ordered a halt to the 20-year business relationship between the sheriffs office and the Review, which, along with covering local business and law, had been the chief publishing venue for required public notices of sheriffs sales and forfeitures. This revenue amounted to thousands of dollars each yearnot a fortune, but enough to matter to a small daily.

From the July/August 2020 issue: The dark soul of the sunshine state

I was the editor in chief of the Review (later renamed the Broward Daily Business Review) and its sister papers in Miami and West Palm Beach, which were owned by American Lawyer Media, the legal publisher created and run by the journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill. When I told Brill what Navarro had done, he conferred with his friend Floyd Abramsthe First Amendment litigator who had represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers caseand we did the traditional American thing: We sued.

We won in 1990, after a two-day trial in the U.S. District Court in Miami. We were upheld unanimously on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. Navarros appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rebuffed.

We won because what Navarro did was plainly illegal. He had used the power of his public office to punish my newspaper for exercising its First Amendment rights.

The parallels between Navarros actions and those of the current governor are unmistakable. DeSantis has spearheaded the successful move to withdraw something of value from the Walt Disney Companyits 50-year control of the special taxing district that essentially governs a 25,000-acre Central Florida spread including Disney Worldin reprisal for Disneys vocal criticism of Floridas Parental Rights in Education Act, assailed as homophobic. With DeSantis, as with Navarro, public authorities withheld a public benefit as punishment for exercising a core constitutional right, and yesterday Disney finally sued.

Even in 1988, the law in this area was neither subtle nor oblique. Brill told me he got the idea of suing the sheriff from his recollections of a class in constitutional law taught by Thomas I. Emerson, a legendary First Amendment scholar at Yale, and Abrams was able to rely on fresh precedent: a 1986 case out of Mississippiupheld by the Fifth Circuitthat was almost precisely on point. There, the federal court ordered a local governing board to restore public-notice advertising it had yanked from a local newspaper in retaliation for the papers criticism of its performance.

The principle wasnt new even then. In a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case brought by a fired community-college teacher, Associate Justice Potter Stewart wrote the majority opinion: For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that even though a person has no right to a valuable governmental benefit and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interestsespecially, his interest in freedom of speech.

The main difference between the Navarro case and the DeSantis-versus-Disney affair was Navarros refusal to admit to his motives. In deposition, Navarro acknowledged that he had learned of the November 17 article from an aide on the morning it ran, while he was vacationing in the Bahamas. Still, he claimed to have ordered the severing of the business relationship out of concern that the Reviews circulation was too low, even though he could cite no circulation numbers or indications that sales picked up after ads began running elsewhere. (During a break in Navarros deposition, the Reviews lead counsel, Abrams, said to me, Now we know what his defense isa fabrication.) Elsewhere, Navarro offered further justifications for what hed done, telling one Review reporter he ran into in a convenience store, A mans got to do what a mans got to do.

Unlike Navarro, however, theres no fabrication or ambiguity when it comes to the recent actions of Florida Governor DeSantis and state lawmakers. DeSantis has proudly denounced Disney for its wokeness, in particular its public opposition to the Dont Say Gay law, which severely restricts classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender. I think they crossed the line, DeSantis said of Disney last spring. Were going to make sure were fighting back when people are threatening our parents and threatening our kids.

In a tweet a few weeks later, DeSantis elaborated: Youre a corporation based in Burbank, California, and youre going to martial your economic might to attack the parents of my state? he wrote. We view that as a provocation, and were going to fight back against that.

The result was a bill, passed by the legislature, to strip Disney of authorization granted in 1967 that allowed it to administer the expanse outside Orlando where Disney World is located.

The money is of a different order of magnitude, but at their core, the anti-Disney moves are illegal for the same reason Sheriff Navarros advertising cutoff was illegal: They are governmental actions that punish a private person or entity for exercising constitutional rights.

From the May 2023 issue: How did Americas weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?

As Abrams wrote to me, Florida didnt have to make any deal with Disney in the first place. It was free to seek to change the terms of it or even abandon it for all sorts of reasons except one: that Disney exercised its First Amendment right to speak out on an issue of public policy. Just as Sheriff Navarro was barred by the First Amendment from cancelling a commercial relationship with a publication because it had criticized him, Gov. DeSantis violated the First Amendment by stripping Disney of a benefit because of its public position on anti-gay rights legislation.

Likewise, the First Amendment scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeleys law school, wrote in an email to me, The law is clear that retaliation against a personthat includes a corporationfor its speech violates the First Amendment. Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature have done exactly that, and said that is what they were doing, in its reprisal against Disney.

Navarro lost his race for a third term as sheriff and left office in 1993. At the time, some commentators blamed his media notoriety, especially his dustup with 2 Live Crew, for his defeat. (Navarro passed away in 2011.) The Broward Review case seems to have played no role in his downfall. Indeed it did little beyond winning my paper $23,000 in damages and our lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

It would, however, be a delicious sort of irony if the rulinga response to Navarros petulant and vindictive actionsnow resurfaces as his most enduring contribution to the rule of law, and affirms anew one of our countrys most basic principles.

More here:
DeSantiss Anti-Disney Moves Are Illegal - The Atlantic