New York Times Editorial: Tough Lessons in a Free Press

New York Times Editorial: Tough Lessons in a Free Press
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/opinion/16sat4.html?ref=opinion


Mayor Philip Amicone of Yonkers has just received what looks like a very expensive lesson in basic Constitutional rights.

Even if a newspaper publishes things that you say are untrue and hurtful to your family and to your re-election bid, and even if the paper seems to be on a political crusade against you, you cannot respond by making the paper’s news racks disappear from city streets. You don’t have police officers issue summonses to employees trying to hand out the paper in and around City Hall.

The lesson cost $8 million — the amount of jury award announced on Wednesday in a lawsuit in Federal District Court in White Plains. The jury found that Mayor Amicone had wrongly seized dozens of news racks and copies of The Westchester Guardian, a free weekly, after it began gleefully criticizing him and his police department. It called him a “tyrant” and “hypocrite.” The jury also found that Mr. Amicone had not been defamed by a 2007 article that said he went to a strip club and got a lap dance from a woman named Sassy.

It was the latest victory in the case for The Guardian and its owner, Sam Zherka, a strip-club owner, real-estate millionaire and self-appointed scourge of whoever in Westchester County’s political establishment offends him, Democrat or Republican. In 2008, Judge Charles Brieant ruled that Yonkers had, indeed, improperly removed Guardian news boxes while leaving other papers’ news boxes alone and ordered the city to pay Mr. Zherka’s court costs.

There is little that is subtle or gracious about Mr. Zherka and his paper, which once ran front-page photos of Mr. Amicone and Mayor Ernest Davis of Mount Vernon with the labels “Dumb” and “Dumber” (Mr. Amicone was “Dumber”). But by acting too literally on his wish to make one infuriating little paper go away, Mr. Amicone went up against the Constitution. He lost.