Former Speaker O’Brien Given Muzzle Award by Media Critic

Since 1998, Dan Kennedy, a former reporter and now journalism professor at Northeastern University and noted author and blogger, has been compiling an annual list of public officials and others who he believes have muzzled the public and the press during the previous year.

The Muzzle Awards had been published in the Boston Phoenix newspaper, which went out of business earlier this year. WGBH, a public radio station out of Boston that has been boosting its news staff and local programming in the wake of the loss of newspapers and talk radio stations in the city, will now publish the list annually.

The list, compiled by Kennedy and Harvey Silvergate, an attorney specializing in civil liberty cases, is published just before the Fourth of July, as a way of highlighting the importance of free speech, personal liberties, and the First Amendment to the Constitution – and those who may have been a detriment to them during the previous year.

Former House Speaker William O’Brien, R-Mont Vernon, made the list this year for barring the two reporters from the Concord Monitor Statehouse bureau from his office during a press avail about potential EBT card abuse. The story and video were first reported on Patch on July 6, 2012.

In the Muzzle Awards piece, Kennedy noted the colorful two years O’Brien served as speaker, which included an altercation with protesters in the gallery of Representatives Hall, a banishment of a Manchester state representative for using a Nazi slogan during a speech on the House floor, and a Monitor editorial cartoon depicting him as Hitler soon after that incident. Two weeks later, at a Tea Party function, O'Brien called the newspaper "Democratic propagandists."  

The full list of the 16th Annual Muzzle Awards can be found here.

Kennedy has a new book out called “The Wired City,” looking at the world of online only news through the eyes of a nonprofit community website in New Haven, CT.