Prairie State Wire

A First Amendment authority says a demand by Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office that a central Illinois newspaper unpublish a story about the governor’s progressive income tax proposal was “highly unusual.”

“Push back from a politician about facts being wrong or problems with the overall tone of the piece is what you normally see,” David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, told Prairie State Wire. “And if the paper did get the facts wrong, it should correct them immediately. But asking for a retraction of an entire article is a pretty extreme measure.”

Pritzker’s office reportedly asked the Jacksonville Journal-Courier last month to unpublish a story by The Center Square about the governor's plans to cut spending if voters in November shoot down his plans to shift from a flat income tax to a progressive one. The tax shift proposal, an amendment to the state constitution, is on the ballot this fall.

In a follow-up story, The Center Square wrote that a spokesman for the governor, Jordan Abudayyeh, sent an email to the paper’s editor saying that the article was "flawed" and lacked context.

"Ultimately, it would be prudent to take down this partisan content masquerading as news," she was quoted as writing in the email. 

The Center Square said that a video accompanying story on its website shows Pritzker saying what he is quoted as saying in the story.

“The governor's office did not alert The Center Square to any errors in the Feb. 7 article, headlined ‘If voters reject progressive income tax, Pritzker promises to cut state spending, and no corrections were published,” the follow-up story said.

Snyder, an attorney, said that only the example more extreme that he’s aware of is a private Swiss bank, Julius Baer Group, in 2008 getting a court order to shut down Wikileaks.org in a dispute over postings on the site by a former employee of the bank. The ruling was later overturned.