South Florida Sun Sentinel. March 4, 2024.
Editorial: Florida anti-free speech bill would chill robust debate
There are no lessons learned in the Florida Legislature.
Prodded by their hostility toward the “liberal media,” lawmakers tried last year to pass a bill that would have made it easier to sue for defamation. It was conservative media owners who realized this “own the libs” measure would have adverse effects.
Corporate media — a term of choice for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who supported last year’s legislation (HB 991) — have resources to fight expensive lawsuits. Small local radio stations and online publications — and your local Rush Limbaughs who might get too loose with facts — do not.
This year, the measure is back in a different version. An unlikely coalition of liberal-leaning groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and libertarian Americans for Prosperity, founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, is fighting it.
Bad for consumers, too
Even the Better Business Bureau, the apolitical nonprofit known for rating businesses and publishing customer complaints, opposes it.
With only a few days left in the 2024 session, prospects for passage thankfully appear dim.
House Bill 757 is an affront to free speech and is probably unconstitutional, a mechanism for public figures to silence negative coverage with the threat of litigation. Sponsor Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, says he wants to hold people accountable for publishing false information.
But his bill clearly goes much further than that.
Lowering the bar for lawsuits
In a nutshell, HB 757 would lower the bar for filing defamation lawsuits. The bar was set in the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. To win a libel case, a public figure must prove “actual malice” — that the statement about them was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth.”
This standard was meant to protect public debate even if someone publishes information that contains errors.
Andrade’s bill would automatically assume malice if a statement about a public figure is proven false — no matter how small the error — and it came from one anonymous source. This could force journalists to decide between revealing their anonymous sources, and potentially endangering them, or face legal ramifications.
Perhaps the strongest rebuke to the legislation came from a grilling that Andrade received by a known conservative radio host. As Trey Radel, a former GOP congressman from southwest Florida, said, the impact on anonymous sources would create “a chilling effect out there for the next person who wants to expose the (Department of Justice, FBI and IRS),” USA Today Network reported.
‘Veracity hearings’
The bill also would force publishers of information into a “veracity hearing,” where they would have to prove their statements are truthful.
Those hearings would happen within 60 days of a motion being filed, giving defendants little time to prepare and forcing them to spend larger amounts of money to defend themselves, which could force smaller news operations or individuals who post something on social media into bankruptcy, Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation, told The Miami Herald Editorial Board.
As The Better Business Bureau wrote in a Feb. 13 letter to legislative leaders, an unscrupulous business unhappy with its ratings could force BBBs to “rush to court in remote jurisdictions without sufficient time for investigation and discovery.”
HB 757 allowed public figures to go “court shopping” by allowing libel suits based on materials posted online to be filed in any court in the state — in other words, jurisdictions that are more friendly to a public figure’s case.
After facing backlash, Andrade proposed an amendment to prohibit lawsuits from being filed “in a venue that does not possess a reasonable connection” to the case.
Andrade contends it’s already against the law to sue people for simply exercising their free-speech rights. But his critics point out that by lowering defamation standards, the legislation weakens such protections against baseless lawsuits. The Better Business Bureau wrote that the veracity hearings might allow plaintiffs to “escape the burden of establishing” a good faith basis for their claim.
What is the purpose of this legislation, then — other than to allow public figures to quash information they don’t like?
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Tampa Bay Times. March 5, 2024.
Editorial: Texting while driving? Why doesn’t Florida ban holding a phone while driving?
Distracted driving, including texting while driving, is a major contributor to traffic crashes and fatalities.
Florida legislators have a chance to make our roads a lot safer. They can ban drivers from holding cellphones behind the wheel.
It’s common sense that drivers with one hand on their smartphones and maybe one on the wheel are distracted, whether they are texting, talking or looking at their calendar, weather apps or the latest sports scores. People know better but do it anyway.
Under HB 1469, drivers would be restricted to hands-free (basically Bluetooth) phone use. They could touch their phone to start or end a call or to fire up Waze or other navigational apps but not interact with the phone in other ways. There are exceptions to report an emergency or a crime. It has passed three House committees and is on the House calendar, awaiting action in the Senate.
It’s time, and here’s why. There were almost 400,000 crashes on Florida roads last year; nearly 3,400 people were killed. Distracted driving, which has skyrocketed since the advent of the smartphone, is a major culprit. Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which works with insurance companies and safety organizations to track phone use behind the wheel, collects anonymized smartphone data, including this stunning statistic: More than a third of drivers who crashed were interacting with their smartphone in the minute before impact. Yes, there’s a big problem.
Let’s do some math. There were more than 14,800 crashes last year in Pinellas County, and 110 people were killed. Hillsborough County had 27,465 crashes and 233 deaths. If more than a third of those drivers were distracted by their smartphones, that would account for 5,000 crashes in Pinellas and more than 9,000 in Hillsborough alone last year. Those are just the crashes, not the close calls.
Each number is a person. That’s why the Senate companion bill, SB 1408, is named the “Anthony Branca and Anita Neal Act.” Neal was the sister of Sen. Tracie Davis, a co-sponsor of the bill. She was killed by a distracted driver while jogging, leaving behind a teenage daughter. Anthony Branca, also killed by a distracted driver, was the son of Demetrius Branca, who is tirelessly pushing the Legislature to adopt this commonsense safety legislation. He laid out his heartfelt campaign in a column in these pages a few days ago.
It’s already against the law to text while driving, but the rule is nearly impossible to enforce. A driver can simply claim he was doing something other than texting while holding his phone. Study after study shows that any use of a smartphone while driving is a distraction. This bill would acknowledge that fact and allow the police to pull over and ticket drivers who are holding their phones and using them. That makes enforcement simpler and would make our roads safer.
It’s time for Florida to join the vast majority of states that already have similar laws. While there are only a few days left in this legislative session, there is still time to pass this legislation. What is more important than acting on a bill that could save so many lives and prevent so many injuries? It’s time to keep drivers’ hands on the wheel and off their phones.
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Orlando Sentinel. March 1, 2024.
Editorial: The Florida Legislature’s obsession with communism is so 1952
Pending legislation would require all Florida schoolchildren to be indoctrinated on the evils of communism. Yes, even those still young enough to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Two bills make the history of communism and its “atrocities” a major requirement of the curriculum through 12th grade.
Only the House bill (HB 1349) specifies that the instruction must be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate.” When the Senate version ( SB 1264 ), cleared its last committee stop, Democrats in the voting minority objected that it was unnecessary, but it’s actually worse than that.
To their credit, all six Democrats on the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee voted no: Sens. Rosalind Osgood from Broward, Lori Berman from Palm Beach, Shevrin Jones from Miami-Dade, and Linda Stewart, Geraldine Thompson and Victor Torres Jr. from Orlando.
Keep politics out of classrooms
The issue isn’t how old kids should be when the state scares them with political bogeymen. It’s about the bill itself. No legislature ever should command any subject to be taught in the slanted way these bills prescribe. Politicians are the last people who should be dictating classroom content.
Not only that, but they overlook what should be taught.
They’re also fighting the wrong battle, as politicians often do. It’s another diversion — some would say a cynical one — from the real dangers to democracy in the United States.
Communism faded away in the 1940s as a political influence anywhere in the U.S., despite Joseph McCarthy’s overblown and highly destructive anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s. It is no threat to our politics or economy, even if some young people have unquestioningly embraced communism’s hammer-and-sickle symbol.
Capitalism in China
Abroad, only China, Laos, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea still profess to be communist. Even China has taken on the trappings of capitalism.
Russia, where it all began, is now run by a capitalist oligarchy that looted the former communist state’s assets. Aleksei Navalny lost his life fighting the corruption.
The new threats to freedom are personified by authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and by a deadly serious antidemocratic movement here at home.
Former President Donald Trump openly admires and cultivates those foreign dictators, repudiates the Republican Party’s historic defense of democracy wherever it is threatened, and makes repulsive jokes about being a dictator “only on Day One” if he’s elected again.
His beguiling influence over so many Americans, worst of all his toadies in Congress, exposes an alarming indifference bordering on contempt for the importance of democracy.
Beating a dead horse
The Legislature should be ensuring that schools teach the positive values of democracy, rather than beating a dead horse.
Statism is the contemporary enemy of humanity. It does not matter under which economic theory it travels; democracy is the antidote.
Freedom House, a nongovernmental agency that has been defending liberty since the rise of Nazi Germany, has been tracking the decline of democracy worldwide for 17 years. The U.S. made the backsliders list because of what the agency describes as our “unequal treatment for people of color, the outsized influence of special interests in politics, and partisan polarization.”
An organization called Lawyers Defending American Democracy has documented anti-democratic trends in Florida, Arizona, Iowa, Tennessee and Texas.
The report faulted Florida for curbing voting by mail; anti-diversity policies in schools and universities; infringing on teaching race, sexism and slavery; crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and gender-related medical care; 15-week and 6-week abortion bans; siphoning public school students into less accountable, tax-subsidized private schools; Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting how schools deal with LBGTQ issues; the takeover of New College of Sarasota; legislation encouraging book-banning; bans on mandatory mask and vaccination rules; the surgeon general’s demonizing of vaccinations; blanket secrecy over university presidential searches and on the governor’s travel; and the governor’s unprecedented claim that he has an “executive privilege” to keep secret anything he chooses, despite Florida’s public records law.
The Legislature is equally responsible for all of that. It should look to its own disloyalty to democracy rather than to indoctrinating school children on any other “-ism,” especially one that’s no more of a threat than those imaginary monsters under their beds.
The communism education bills serve only the insatiable need of some Cuban émigré legislators to flog the corpse of Fidel Castro. They are also useful for forcing opponents — only Democrats so far — to cast votes that may return to haunt them in attack ads. (“Senator so-and-so is pro-Communist!”)
A law DeSantis signed in 2022 already requires schools to observe “Victims of Communism Day” every Nov. 7. Current state academic standards for social studies incorporate communism in the requirements for grades 7 and 9-12. That’s plenty.
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Miami Herald. March 1, 2024.
Editorial: DeSantis is right about social media ban. This misguided idea deserves his veto
Give Gov. Ron DeSantis some credit. He’s at least being consistent with his criticism of the Florida Legislature’s attempt to ban minors from social media.
If lawmakers gave parents the power to remove books and sue schools for talking about things like sexual orientation and race in ways that make them uncomfortable, shouldn’t they also give parents a say on the types of websites their child can access?
Just hours before the Legislature passed the bill to keep children under 16 from platforms that have “addicting features,” DeSantis said there were “legitimate issues that gotta be worked out” and that parents should be allowed to override the state’s heavy-handed ban.
The Legislature defied the governor and approved House Bill 1 anyway because it’s a priority of the House speaker.
DeSantis should veto HB 1, and not just to show lawmakers he’s still the dominant governor who’s controlled their agenda for the past two years — though there are questions on whether DeSantis has lost some of his power, and the Legislature could embarrass him by overriding his veto.
The legislation is a well-intended but misguided way to tackle the very real dangers that social media present to teens. It’s a no-brainer that those platforms deserve scrutiny, especially after a whistle-blower told Congress in 2021 that Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, knew its content harmed kids. But HB 1’s lack of “parental rights,” a concept that drove much of the legislation coming out of Florida recently, isn’t the only problem.
The U.S. Supreme Court is already listening to another Florida law that prohibited social media platforms from removing political candidates — and so far, justices appear skeptical of the law’s constitutionality.
If signed into law, HB 1 will no doubt also be headed to court, with social media companies arguing it is unconstitutional, costing taxpayer dollars to defend these lengthy lawsuits. Similar laws from other states have not fared well under legal scrutiny, with all of them blocked by judges.
That raises a valid point: Aren’t children and teens allowed freedom of expression under the First Amendment, especially if their parents allow it? There is no doubt that social media perpetuates unattainable beauty standards that hurt young girls’ self-esteem, makes cyberbullying more pervasive and that it is designed for non-stop scrolling. But social media also helps kids connect in ways that previous generations didn’t. It’s where they can find communities of like-minded people they might not have at home or school. Social media isn’t just for socializing; it’s an essential business tool that many kids will need to learn to enter the job market one day.
And, then, there is the question of the legislation’s practicality. For one, Republican House Speaker Paul Renner has said not all platforms would be affected by the ban unless they use “addicting features” — including infinite scrolling, displaying personal metrics such as likes, auto-playing video and livestreaming — but lawmakers have not said which sites would be affected. The most popular social media sites like Instagram and TikTok contain these same features.
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Palm Beach Post. March 3, 2024.
Editorial: With Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s anti-vaccine stance failing, Florida needs a new surgeon general
Here we go again: Florida facing another dangerous virus, while the state’s top health official thumbs his nose at conventional medical wisdom. Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo is drawing warranted criticism for his initial lax response to the state’s measles outbreak. Instead of urging parents to vaccinate their children, he waffled, leaving the decision to the parents with a hint at an anti-vax stance that made him infamous during COVID-19.
Ladapo’s response is the latest in what has been a three-year string of controversy that has undermined the surgeon general’s office and the Florida Department of Health. Whether it’s altering a medical study to support fringe thinking or ignoring a request to put on a mask during the height of the pandemic by state Sen. Tina Polsky, D. Boca Raton, whose breast cancer made her susceptible to COVID. The Ladapo era in Florida must end.
Florida deserves a credible public health leader, not an ongoing embarrassment. Right now, the state is stuck with a political appointee who’s taking up space but not taking the job or his craft seriously. The Palm Beach Post editorial board believes it’s time for a change. The Governor, and more importantly the state, needs a new surgeon general.
Up until now, Gov. Ron DeSantis seems OK with his appointee’s performance. The Governor needed a shill to buttress an anti-COVID mandate schtick that became part of DeSantis’ ill-fated presidential campaign. Meanwhile more than 81,000 Floridians died from COVID. Will the Governor make the change? Probably not, unless the spread of measles forces his hand. It shouldn’t have to come to that. Ladapo’s performance is enough to justify replacement.
Measles spread helped by misinformation
Prior to the 1963 Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine, nearly every child living in the U.S. had measles by the time they reached 15, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.. CDC data showed between 3 million to 4 million people were affected each year, with 500 dying and 48,000 persons hospitalized.
Why measles is making a comeback isn’t a head-scratcher. It only takes two doses of the MMR vaccine, which is 97% effective, to prevent the disease, and there are many more vaccinated against measles in Florida than not. It’s the contagion of misinformation undermining proven medical vaccines that has taken a toll on the nation’s progress toward eradicating dangerous diseases. In his role, Ladapo has done more than enough to become modern medicine’s chief cheerleader of misinformation.
Gov. DeSantis selected Ladapo from the University of California David Geffen School of Medicine in 2021, to replace former Surgeon General Scott Rivkees. The appointment came with $250,000 in pay to head the Florida Department of Health and another $262,000 as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida. It was a controversial pick to say the least.
Ladapo’s association with America’s Frontline Doctors, a controversial group of physicians known for questionable cures drew criticism, as has his constant criticism of COVID vaccines and masks as effective treatments. His quick appointment to the university, along with an inability to produce grants, ultimately drew the ire of his UF colleagues. As surgeon general, he altered a state study last year to suggest that some COVID-19 doses pose higher health risks for young men than what’s been established by the medical community. In January, he called on the federal government to halt using the mRNA vaccine, describing it as the “anti-Christ” of all products.
The surgeon general’s initial response to the measles outbreak was a muddled equivocation of a Feb. 20 advisory to Broward County parents that careened from acknowledging what “is normally recommended” to deferring any decision regarding school attendance to the parents. Ambiguity isn’t the typical response to a potential public-health crisis. Under normal circumstances, public health officials would follow federal guidelines in urging unvaccinated children to either get a MMR shot or stay at home until any symptoms subside without medication.
Ladapo’s pandemic track record and his more recent response regarding measles vaccinations leave us wondering if he will ever shake off the anti-vaccination pandering to do his job as a public health official effectively. We’re not convinced he will. For those reasons, we believe Florida would be better off with a new surgeon general.
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