In the weeks before President Trump announced the shutdown of Voice of America, I did some reporting on its destructive impact. Now, former VOA employees are suing the administration claiming that they have a First Amendment right to their jobs.
The lawsuit against the United States comes from Reporters Without Borders, a Soros-funded leftist activist group, “the VOA Journalists, and other employees represented by the Plaintiff Federal Employee Unions and NG-CWA, have suffered and continue to suffer irreparable harm as a result of Defendants’ conduct, including—in derogation of their rights under the First Amendment.”
The lawsuit contends that, “what is happening to the VOA Journalists is not just the chilling of First Amendment speech; it is a government shutdown of journalism, a prior restraint that kills content before it can be created.”
“VOA cannot continue to function as required by law when placed under these types of pressures. And its reporters, facing serious and personal risks to their future—and for some foreign correspondents, their safety—have been and unquestionably will be chilled in their news coverage. This is the very type of irreparable harm that the First Amendment and the statutory firewall are meant to protect against.”
The Founding Fathers would have considered a government media outlet to be an absolute First Amendment horror show. The idea of such a thing is actually outlawed and was unacceptable until Obama tore down the firewall allowing VOA to push leftist agitprop to Americans.
There is a First Amendment right to a free press. A government press is not a free press. It’s the opposite of a free press.
Dismantling government media is in the best tradition of the First Amendment.
The only 3 named reporters in this lawsuit are Patsy Widakuswara, (pictured above) an Indonesian on the White House beat who had become notorious for her tantrums, and a poster girl for shutting down VOA, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, who isn’t even a reporter but a director of strategy at VOA’s parent, the US Agency for Global Media.
The lawsuit was also filed, for entirely unclear reasons, in Manhattan, even though the VOA is headquartered in D.C.
Will a federal judge decide that government employees have First Amendment rights to their jobs? I wouldn’t rule it out. These same folks who claimed that the First Amendment doesn’t protect conservative journalists from being censored through government ‘jawboning’ will also claim that Freedom of the Press really means Employment of the Press.