Media Matters for America v. Paxton

Court: U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

Date Filed: July 17, 2024

Background: In November 2023, Media Matters for America published an analysis observing that the social media company X had placed ads from major brands alongside white nationalist and antisemitic content. 

Days later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was opening an investigation into Media Matters under the Texas Business Organizations Code and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, alleging that the nonprofit “fraudulently manipulated data on X.com.” As part of its investigation, Paxton’s office issued a civil investigative demand seeking a variety of records from Media Matters, including internal and external communications about the analysis. 

Media Matters sought a preliminary injunction blocking Paxton from enforcing the CID, claiming that it violated the nonprofit’s First Amendment rights. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the motion, finding that the investigation into Media Matters had a “chilling effect on [its] First Amendment rights.”

Paxton’s office then appealed the district court’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Our Position: The appeals court should affirm the district court’s preliminary injunction and reject Paxton’s effort to use consumer-protection laws to police public discourse.

• The First Amendment prohibits the government from enforcing a preferred standard of editorial fairness.

• The First Amendment prohibits the government from repackaging editorial fairness as consumer fairness.

From the Brief: “[Paxton] has pioneered efforts to repackage ideological fairness as consumer fairness to chill the publication of information and the expression of views with which he disagrees. Such efforts pose a grave threat to the First Amendment rights of the news media, and while Attorney General Paxton’s campaign began in Silicon Valley, it knows no geographic or industry limits and creeps closer and closer to the heartland of the press function.”

Related: In Yelp v. Paxton and Twitter v. Paxton, the Reporters Committee filed friend-of-the-court briefs challenging the Texas attorney general’s other efforts to invoke the Deceptive Trade Practices Act to enforce his own vision of editorial fairness.