A breaking prior restraint case in Kansas City, where on Friday a state court judge ordered the Kansas City Star and the local alternative newsweekly, The Pitch (owned by Village Voice Media), to remove articles about the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities from their websites and barred them from publishing certain articles about the BPU in their print editions.
At issue was a confidential letter, upon which the articles were based, written to BPU officials by the board’s attorney about BPU power plants. (h/t to Scatablog).
As if the prior restraint were not egregious enough, the judge didn’t schedule the next hearing on the matter until next Friday.
Late update: As a couple readers have pointed out, the stories in question weren’t pulled from the newspaper websites before they were cached by the search engines, a fact that may often make such prior restraint orders moot in this day and age, in addition to all of the other constitutional problems. The Pitch story is in Google’s cache, and the KC Star story is cached in Google as well. Thanks to TPM Readers PK and MD for the links.
