Jesse Scheckner
A bill that would compel news outlets to remove false, defamatory or outdated reports from their websites or lose their media privileges in court cleared its first House committee stop with uniform support from the dais.
The House Civil Justice and Claims Subcommittee voted 13-0 for HB 667, which would require a news publication or broadcast station to permanently delete any report on its web server if it learns, either through a court decision or information that a “reasonable person” would believe, that the report contains false or defamatory information.
If an outlet refuses to take down the story, it would lose its fair report privilege considerations in defamation and libel lawsuits.
The site must erase the story even if just one word or sentence is inaccurate. Stories that no longer reflect up-to-date information, such as the exoneration or nonprosecution of someone, would also have to be removed.
“This is not about trying to do anything negative to the media,” said Inverness Republican Rep. J.J. Grow, the bill’s sponsor. “It’s not about First Amendment rights. It’s about humanity. It’s about lives being destroyed.”
HB 667 was filed at the behest of Miami lawyer Barry Richard, the husband of Tallahassee Democratic Rep. Allison Tant, the bill’s cosponsor. One of Richard’s clients was arrested for a crime in 2017 that a State Attorney later decided not to prosecute due to insufficient evidence. While some news outlets complied with the man’s request that they remove stories about his arrest, one refused to do so on the grounds that its reporting wasn’t inaccurate, just outdated.
“Today, seven years later, if you Google his name you will see him in the orange jumpsuit being accused of a crime,” Richard said.
The bill’s Senate analog (SB 752) ran into ample pushback from Democratic lawmakers and First Amendment advocates in its first to committee hearings. That wasn’t as much the case in the House on Thursday, when only a few lawyers and representatives of ACLU Florida and the Florida Press Association spoke out against it.
None of the committee’s Democratic members opposed the bill.
“From my understanding, a journalist would want truth and accuracy,” said St. Petersburg Democratic Rep. Michelle Rayner, a civil rights lawyer. “What’s the affinity for keeping false information up — and not just false information, (but) information that you would know to be false?”
Democratic Reps. Kimberly Daniels of Jacksonville and Mike Gottlieb, a Davie defense lawyer, were similarly unsympathetic to outcry against the bill.
Republican Reps. Kim Kendall of St. Augustine and Vicki Lopez of Miami both recounted how they were “maligned” by the press, Lopez for a since-vacated conviction decades ago and Kendall over false reports that she lied about bomb threats targeting her when she worked for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Kendall said she reached out to the outlet to get a retraction. “There was a book on it. There was a ‘Forensic Files’ episode on it. They had all that information,” she said. “To this day, there’s no retraction.”
Kara LoCicero, a Tampa-based First Amendment lawyer, warned the bill would adversely impact not only news outlets but religious broadcasters, conservative commentators and myriad other media outlets.
Bobby Block of the First Amendment Foundation said that the news outlets didn’t do Richard’s client an injustice; the judicial system did, and all that TV station did was report facts, including the report Richard took umbrage with whose title read, “Prosecutor drops case.”
“They may be inconvenient facts, but they are true,” he said. “If we buy into this logic, we would have to erase the O.J. Simpson car chase and every report on Casey Anthony from history. Does anyone believe that Casey Anthony was defamed by her murder charge?”
HB 667 and SB 752, sponsored by Tallahassee Republican Sen. Corey Simon, are spiritual successors to bills Pensacola Republican Rep. Alex Andrade unsuccessfully carried in 2023 and 2024.
Last year’s version of Andrade’s legislation, which had Senate support from Lake Mary Republican Sen. Jason Brodeur, would have lowered the bar in defamation lawsuits by shifting the burden of proof from the plaintiff to the defendant. It also would have required courts to accept as fact that if a defamatory statement about a public figure is published and the statement relied on an anonymous source, the publisher acted with malice.
Gov. Ron DeSantis boosted the concept in 2023 to hold national media outlets accountable. Still, Andrade’s bill drew the ire of several conservative outlets and criticism from Stephen Miller, a policy adviser to President Donald Trump, who suggested the change could suppress conservative speech.
HB 667 will next go to the House Judiciary Committee, after which it would be subject to a vote by the full chamber.
SB 752 cleared its first two Senate committees, albeit with “no” votes from Democrats at each stop, and is next to be heard by the Senate Rules Committee before reaching the floor.
One comment
Ron Ogden
March 27, 2025 at 10:05 pm
““What’s the affinity for keeping false information up — and not just false information, (but) information that you would know to be false?”
Wow! And that question came from a representative of St. Petersburg, which for decades was and remains the headquarters of the journalism of the agenda. Throughout the middle part of the last century, the main newspaper there was where you went to learn how to spin facts instead of report them frankly. I plainly recall 40 years or so ago, when I first got to town and asked about journalism, I was told that to be hired at the Times meant that you had to go through a crash course in its brand of social science because the purpose of the work was to attack people its editors felt possessed “privilege.”
Now that newspaper is a shell of itself, and the entire house of cards, particularly in Washington and Los Angeles, is collapsing.
Praise God I’ve lived this long.