A newspaper based in Delaware County, N.Y. sued county officials in December, claiming they unlawfully canceled its public notice contract in retaliation for unfavorable news coverage. The Reporter, a weekly newspaper based in the county seat of Delhi, also alleges the county violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by ordering its employees to refer all questions from the paper to the county attorney’s office.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Decker Advertising, the agency that owns The Reporter.

Various county officials had complained since 2019 about The Reporter’s coverage. The conflict burst into public view in March 2022, when the county’s board of supervisors voted to revoke the publication’s status as one of its official newspapers, replacing it with a paper with less than half its circulation. The Reporter had been publishing the county’s notices virtually since it was founded in 1881.

The decision to cancel the contract came one week after the county attorney wrote a letter to co-owner Kim Shepard (sitting in photo above) complaining about a story reported by the paper’s editor, Lillian Browne (on right in photo). The county official claimed Browne had “a history of writing stories about Delaware County which are selectively researched, one-sided and ignore or minimize any facts incompatible with her intended narrative.”

After repeated requests by Ms. Shepard for information about why the contract was terminated, the county sent The Reporter a letter in March 2023 alleging the paper’s articles “are written in an inflammatory manner” and include “editorial remarks … made to put a negative light on the County government.”

“This flagrant manipulation of facts and the manner in which your paper reports county business was one of the reasons the Board of Supervisors opted to change the official county paper,” the county explained. “This action alone should have signaled to you a problem in the operations of your business and prompted an immediate change.”

The Reporter has a very strong case. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from retaliating against media outlets for expressing a viewpoint government officials disagree with. So Delaware County’s letter may serve as an unintentional admission of guilt. Yet 39 local officials, including the county attorney and the acting district attorney, affixed their signatures to it.

Ms. Shepard and her spouse and co-owner Randy Shepard (on left in photo) contacted “a number of signatories” to learn more about their motivation for signing the letter. They discovered many of the officials “either did not read the newspaper at all prior to the letter being sent or had no issues with its coverage.”

You may remember the Shepards from a story published last summer in the New York Times about “How Local Officials Seek Revenge on Their Hometown Newspapers.” A week after that story was published the county issued the directive ordering its employees to refer contacts from The Reporter to the county attorney.

The board of supervisors had an opportunity to at least partially moot the Shepard’s lawsuit last month when it met to select the county’s official newspapers for the coming year. But through a remarkable act of legislative jiu jitsu the board voted instead to prolong its apparent illegal punishment of The Reporter and increase the potential damages that may ultimately be subsidized by its taxpayers.

For those interested in learning more about the case, The Reporter posted its legal demand and supporting documents on Dropbox.