The News & Observer
Newspaper boxes have returned to Raleigh-Durham International Airport after a six-year legal battle between news organizations and the airport authority, which wanted to sell printed papers only in terminal shops. USA Today, The New York Times and The News & Observer are available in shops and boxes, after a federal appeals court upheld a 2008 ruling “that the news rack ban violated the newspapers’ First Amendment right to disseminate the news.” In his ruling, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said:
“It must be remembered that a news rack ban like the one in place primarily restricts political speech and that political speech, of course, is at the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect … An informed citizenry is at the heart of this democracy, and narrowing the arteries of information in the manner sought by the Authority will only serve to impair our country’s coronary health.”
Wilkinson was an editor at The Virginian-Pilot for three years in the late ’70s and early ’80s. || Related: Newspaper boxes are a First Amendment issue in another North Carolina county, which notes that the Supreme Court has even weighed in on news rack First Amendment cases.
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