The tiny city of Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta has given the world the musicians Sam Cooke and John Lee Hooker, and calls itself the home of the blues.
Now it has found a new claim to fame: It has become the nation’s hottest battleground over freedom of the press—one where the Democratic mayor has outdone President Donald Trump with a bare-knuckled attack on the media.
This week the mayor’s thin-skinned feud with the family-owned local newspaper went from a low-level quarrel to a sweeping legal ruling which, critics say, upends the First Amendment, and presents a clear and present danger to the free press.
It has put Mayor Chuck Espy at the forefront of what watchdogs warn are escalating attempts to muzzle journalists and shut down criticism of politicians, all with the help of public funds, which he is using to fund his case against the Clarksdale Press Register.
The dispute between the mayor and the paper was hardly unusual until Espy used his city’s lawyers to ask a court for an extraordinary measure—to order the Press Register to take down an editorial which was critical of him and other elected officials. Then, in a ruling which has shocked press freedom advocates, a Hinds County judge, Crystal Wise Martin, granted him his wish.
The Press Register, she ruled, must remove an editorial headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust” pending a full hearing on Feb. 28. “A newspaper cannot tell a malicious lie and not be held liable,” she ruled. The Press Register—where a staff of five produce the weekly print edition (circulation 3,000)—complied and pulled the editorial off its website. The paper was already printed and distributed.
That leaves Clarksdale—population 13,850—and its mayor looking more successful than Trump and his White House in battling the media. Now press freedom advocates are registering concern that the move gives a green light for other small-town politicians to attack their local papers over coverage they dislike.
Espy, the Daily Beast learned, has been upset at the 160-year-old Press Register for years, and made an enemy of its owner, Wyatt Emmerich, and publisher, Floyd Ingram. Espy, now 49, was first elected mayor in 2017. After he won a second four-year term in the summer of 2021, he and the city’s board voted in a closed meeting to give themselves raises that boosted his salary from $86,422 to $122,421—more than Mississippi’s state governor and triple the 2024 median wage in the state, according to payroll provider ADP. Unsurprisingly, it was important news for the Press Register, and Ingram reported the rises.
That appeared to enrage Espy, Emmerich suggested. Emmerich claimed on a podcast in 2023 that Espy offered him $30,000 to fire Ingram. (Espy declined to comment to the Daily Beast.) Espy has also called Ingram “evil, wicked, and racist” in live-streamed meetings, and has supported boycotts of the newspaper.
Then on Feb. 4, city officials gathered for a meeting over plans to ask the Mississippi Legislature to impose a 2 percent tax on alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco. The meeting had been announced without a date, in a public notice that said the press would be informed. But they were not.
Four days later, on Feb. 8, Ingram took the city board to task and asked in a scathing editorial whether they had been wanting to approve things out of the eye of the public. “Maybe they just want a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea—at public expense,” he wrote. He also wondered if the cash the tax would bring in would be used by politicians to earn votes.
A week later, after the paper had been delivered to its 3,000 subscribers—something Ingram does himself—the city sued on behalf of Espy. Ingram’s article “chilled and hindered” officials’ attempts to meet with legislators over the proposal, the city claimed. And therefore it should be taken down. Incidentally, the city claimed, the city clerk had simply forgotten to tell the press about the meeting.
Lawyers told the Beast the case should have been a slam-dunk for the Press Register and immediately dismissed by the judge. Seth Stern, an attorney and the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said there is a fundamental principle that nobody can sue because they dislike an opinion.
“Plus, regardless of that the city cannot sue for defamation anyhow, so the case is frivolous on any number of levels,” Stern said. Finally, public officials can only sue—on their own dime—if they can prove the paper acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth, a standard which dates back to the 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which calls that standard “actual malice.”
But instead of instantly kicking the case out, the judge ruled that the article should be withdrawn pending a full hearing.
Melvin Miller, the city’s attorney, told the Beast that Ingram had acted with “actual malice,” and suggested the case could become a test case for Sullivan. “You can’t just hide behind opinion anymore. You can’t say anything,” Miller said. “That’s kind of the narrow way we’re going.”
Miller also claimed, “We’re not trying to suppress all speech, just one based on what we call a lie, that was not true. We are not against freedom of the press.”
Some conservatives—including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and especially Donald Trump—want the ruling overturned to make it far easier to sue. Press freedom advocates see such a move as a disaster that would make reporting and opinion-writing close to impossible.
The Press Register’s case is now a cause célèbre, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) offering to represent the paper pro bono.
“It’s absurd,” Emmerich, the owner, said. “We criticize the city council for not being sufficiently transparent, and they sue us for libel. I mean, I’ve been in this business 50 years. I’ve never seen anything remotely like this. They’re not happy with us doing our typical, traditional role as a government watchdog, and so they’re suing us. It’s intimidation, it’s harassment.”
He added, “I warned them that this was going to blow up in their face, because this is just stupid, but they didn’t listen to me.”
Espy did not respond to multiple requests for comment, though he wrote in a statement posted on Facebook that “the City of Clarksdale WON today” when the judge ruled that “a newspaper cannot tell a malicious lie and not be held liable.”
His scorched-earth tactics and social media pronouncements draw inevitable parallels with Trump—but Espy’s success in persuading a judge to force down an opinion article goes far beyond what Trump has managed.
Ingram, the editor, publisher and occasional delivery driver, said he was used to criticism and even anger, but being sued by the mayor over an editorial was something new. “To have the hate and desire to destroy an institution that is so critical to every community, it’s cause for concern,” he said.
“There are tens of thousands of Floyd Ingrams out there that will be putting together a paper this week and serving their community, men and women,” Ingram added. “And it’s a shame when City Hall decides they will destroy a newspaper man.”
