Legal Schnauzer publisher Roger Shuler released after more than 5 months in Alabama jail

[Jim Lane]

28. In general, yes, there are circumstances in which a court can make such an order.

You can phrase it as "ordering a journalist to stand down" -- but journalists (whether self-appointed or employed by the MSM) are not above the law and must in general follow the same rules as the rest of us. (Some states have shield laws allowing journalists to protect sources in ways that aren't available to non-journalists, but that isn't applicable here. The allegation against Shuler is defamation, and there is no journalistic privilege to defame.)

You can put scare quotes around the word "offensive" but the fact is that our First Amendment jurisprudence recognizes many cases in which people can be punished for saying or publishing things, such as defamation, trade libel, copyright infringement, pornography, invasion of privacy, breach of a nondisclosure agreement, and probably a few more that don't pop into my mind at the moment. In some of those cases, yes, a court can order someone to "stand down" in the sense of removing the challenged material from a website. Copyright infringement is probably the most obvious case. Defamation is less clear to me without doing some research.

If someone posts defamatory material on a website, and the person who complains about it wins the lawsuit, it's obvious that the court can order the defendant (journalist or not) to pay money damages. Can the court, as part of a final judgment, also direct that the defamatory material be removed from the website? I don't know but my semi-wild-assed guess is Yes. Can the court, before there's been a full trial on the merits, issue a preliminary injunction with such a requirement, to remain in effect pending the final judgment? Again I don't know. I do know that prior restraint on speech is disfavored, and most judges would be very reluctant to issue such a preliminary injunction. Nevertheless, if the court has the power to order such an action in the final judgment, then it probably has the power to issue a preliminary injunction, and might well be justified in doing so in an extreme case.

Suppose a liberal college professor named Ebenezer Smith is making his first run for elective office, challenging the incumbent Tea Party Congressmember. A RW blogger creates a website accusing Smith of all manner of things, with, for example, images (wholly falsified) of what look like criminal convictions for child molestation and a completely fallacious story that the university reprimanded Smith for misuse of college funds. Smith's defamation action against the blogger won't come to trial until after the election. Is it legal for the court to order the RW blogger to stand down, i.e., to remove these lies about Smith? Somehow the injunction doesn't seem quite so outlandish under those circumstances, does it?

As for whether Shuler was in fact "tossed into jail before being served with any court order to take down anything", there's reason to doubt his contentions to that effect, as noted by struggle4progress in #21 in this thread.