An Arkansas federal judge on Wednesday denied a request by an energy company to temporarily block the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from publishing additional details from confidential documents that the newspaper obtained about the company’s involvement in building a facility that will supply power to a $4 billion Google data center in that state, a court filing showed.
The company, Entergy Arkansas, also had asked Judge Lee Rudofsky to order that the Democrat-Gazette remove from its website information in an article published on Monday about the documents.
“I think you have a strong case here,” Rudofsky told a lawyer for Entergy at a hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Little Rock, according to a report in the El Dorado News Times. “But the First Amendment gives me pause here.”
The judge said, “It would take a lot to get me to do a prior restraint,” the News Times reported.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation has noted that “The Supreme Court has made clear time and again that prior restraints” — barring a media outlet from publishing certain stories — “can be justified in only the most extreme circumstances.”
Rudofsky in his order Wednesday denied Entergy’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Democrat-Gazette and other defendants. A court filing showed he plans to set a briefing schedule on Entergy’s request for a preliminary injunction in the case at a later date.
The Arkansas Times, which was also a defendant in the case, reported that during a hearing Wednesday, Rudofsky said the case involved an issue of “significant public concern.”
“Public utility companies’ special arrangements with a large data center may very well have repercussions across the state, presumably, or at least potentially, in both very positive and potentially, or presumably, negative ways,” the judge said, according to the Times.
He also said that Entergy was a utility that could be considered a monopoly “and the details of its business arrangement, especially with large users of power, for example … Google, are matters that an ordinary Arkansas citizen may very well want to be aware of.”
Entergy, in a statement after the order was issued, said, “We will never waver when it comes to protecting our customers’ privacy and confidential information. It is both the right thing to do and required by law.”
“We protect all customer information — whether it involves a household, a local manufacturer, or a global company,” the company said.
Lee Wolverton, executive editor of the Democrat-Gazette, in a statement Wednesday, said, “This case is first, foremost and in its entirety about the First Amendment. Our duty as a news organization and the duty of all news organizations is to inform the public as fully as possible about issues of high public interest.”
“Any attempt to impede that effort by using the courts to apply prior restraint to any news organization’s First Amendment rights represents an attack on the very freedoms that define our country,”…
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