“I would run this bill for a Democratic governor,” said Holcomb, who called characterizations that the exemption keeps the public in the dark about vital information “garbage.”īlock said lawmakers could have narrowly tailored a measure to redact specific details about security personnel and strategies. Jeff Holcomb, a Republican who introduced the legislation, told NBC News that the project “was given to me by leadership” to address security “glitches.”
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The First Amendment Foundation, a Tallahassee-based open government advocacy group, viewed DeSantis’ attempt to reframe defamation law as “the biggest threat to free speech and a free press” during the state’s legislative session, said Bobby Block, the group’s executive director.įreshman state Rep. Supreme Court ruling, requires public figures to prove that journalists knowingly published false information or did so in “reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” That standard, set by a landmark 1964 U.S. Afterward, GOP lawmakers introduced legislation to make it easier for elected officials and other public figures to sue the media for defamation over critical news stories and commentary.Īmong other changes, the measures aimed to strip reporters’ legal privileges to keep anonymous sources confidential and lower the “actual malice” standard required for public officials to prove defamation. In February, DeSantis livestreamed a panel discussion calling for reforms to defamation law. The issue had never landed before a Florida court, as other governors “probably didn’t want to rock the boat,” she added. “I could find no instance of any Florida governor ever claiming executive privilege before DeSantis did,” Cameron told NBC News. The ruling - a first in DeSantis’ favor on the issue - isn’t binding to other courts, but some open government activists and media groups fear it will embolden DeSantis’ use of executive authority.Ĭatherine Cameron, a media law professor for Stetson University College of Law who has researched the issue, said DeSantis is among a handful of governors to use executive privilege to withhold public records - and appears to be the only Florida governor in history to do so. In a January ruling on one of those lawsuits - a case involving an anonymous requester who sought the names of DeSantis’ advisers for deciding his picks for the state supreme court - a Leon County judge agreed he could invoke the authority. In legal filings, lawyers for the governor have contended DeSantis can exercise executive privilege to withhold records at his discretion, although such an exemption isn’t cited in the state’s laws or its constitution. Since taking office in 2019, DeSantis has repeatedly tested the letter and spirit of Florida’s sunshine laws and constitutional guarantees, sometimes bypassing the Legislature in novel ways, experts say. Only Florida’s Legislature is constitutionally authorized to make exceptions to the state’s Public Records Act, as long as it can justify each exemption as a “public necessity” and make it “no broader than necessary.”
Such rights include access to records held by the state’s governor. In 1992, Floridians overwhelmingly approved an amendment to enshrine citizens’ access to public records and open meetings as rights in the state’s constitution - the first state to do so. Testing the lawįlorida has long had a reputation for government transparency, boasting some of the nation’s broadest public records and open meetings laws. Adam Marshall, a lawyer for the national nonprofit Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said transparency in Florida had fallen before DeSantis, but that “decrease is now accelerating.” He added that transparency at the federal level is already bad and likely would not improve under a DeSantis presidency.
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