By Dan McKay
A federal prosecutor’s letter to a medical journal skeptically asking about its commitment to nonpartisan debate is an unusual intrusion into editorial decision-making and may interfere with the publication’s First Amendment rights, free speech experts say.
In a letter last week, Edward R. Martin Jr., interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said “it’s been brought to my attention that” publications like CHEST Journal act as partisans in scientific debates.
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“It is unusual and troubling for a U.S. attorney’s office to inquire about editorial decisions of a medical journal,” said Ashkhen Kazaryan, senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University.
“Such inquiries,” she said, “can carry the weight of state power and intimidate editors and researchers from engaging in legitimate discourse. That is exactly the type of censorship and chilling of speech that the First Amendment is designed to prevent.”
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First Amendment ‘Foundations’
Kazaryan, who led a content regulation team at Meta and is now at Vanderbilt’s Future of Free Speech, said the government has no authority to dictate a private medical journal’s decisions about what to publish, absent clear evidence of illegal conduct.
“Government officials, including prosecutors, have immense power, and that power must be exercised with extreme care when it intersects with speech,” she said. “We must ensure that our scientific and academic institutions remain spaces for open and rigorous debate.”
“Suppressing or even threatening to investigate dissenting views,” Kazaryan said, “corrodes the core foundations of the First Amendment.”
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Ashkhen Kazaryan
Ashkhen Kazaryan is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech, where she leads initiatives to protect free expression and shape policies that uphold the First Amendment in the digital age.