The press may be a watchdog, but State Rep. Darin Harbick (R-Oakridge) wants to yank its leash.
How hard? Critics and supporters of House Bill 3564 differ on that point.
Drafted by Harbick, the bill expands from 20 to 60 days the time people have to accuse a print, digital or broadcast news outlet of defamation and demand a correction or retraction. Publishers then have two weeks to decide whether or not to issue a correction or retraction and express regret.
The bill was born from the experience of Harbick’s son, who also serves as his father’s legislative aid. The younger Harbick took issue with the Eugene Weekly’s publication of photos he shared on social media from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, one of which he captioned: “Capitol breached lol.”
According to current state law, a plaintiff shall not recover damages from a news organization unless a correction/retraction is demanded but not provided. The bill changes “shall not” to “may not.” So, if passed, plaintiffs would retain the ability to recover damages even if a correction/retraction is issued.
The bill also requires any offending material to be immediately scrubbed from the news outlet’s digital archives.
“House Bill 3564 tramples all over the First Amendment,” Pulitzer Prize-nominated Oregon newspaper editor and journalism educator Steve Bagwell told Street Roots. “It is unconstitutional on its face.”
Chelsea Marr, the president of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, told Street Roots her organization doesn’t support the bill either.
“The Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association does not believe this bill should move forward as is and will require amendments,” said Marr, who is also the publisher of the weekly Columbia Gorge News in Hood River. “This proposed legislation has many flaws that will only complicate the action newspapers already use for providing retractions.”
The bill is a solution in search of a problem, she added.
“Oregon has a retraction statute in place, one of the best in the country, that has worked well for years to allow the public retractions in a timely and efficient manner,” she said.
However, no one opposed the bill in either verbal or written testimony during a public hearing March 17 before the House Judiciary Committee. Lawmakers will decide whether the committee will send the bill to the House floor in a work session on Monday, April 7, at 3 p.m. in Hearing Room F.
Harbick told committee members that House Bill 3564 was his first crack at drafting legislation. (The freshman lawmaker is also among the chief sponsors of eight other bills this session — including House Bill 2037, to ban transgender athletes from school sports, and House Bill 3551, which would require public agencies to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.)
House Bill 3564’s co-sponsors include Harbick’s fellow Republican state representatives, Ed Diehl of Stayton and Alek Skarlatos of Canyonville, and state Sen. Bruce Starr of McMinnville.
The bill began with Harbick’s son.
Tyler Harbick posted photos on Facebook from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He captioned one of the photos: “Capitol breached lol.”
After Eugene Weekly ran screenshots of the photos in the paper’s Nov. 7, 2024, edition, Tyler Harbick claimed the newspaper characterized him as a participant rather than an observer and demanded a retraction.
The younger Harbick acknowledged being present at the rally and marching to the Capitol. However, Eugene Weekly’s Publisher Jody Rolnick obliged his demand. She ran a correction 35 days later on Dec. 12 and quoted Harbick’s attorney Bert Krages.
“Although Mr. Harbick witnessed some of the events surrounding the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, he did not participate in the insurrection itself,” Krages said in a statement.
The newspaper’s original reporting remained on its website for several months before it was scrubbed, Tyler Harbick told committee members during the March 17 hearing. It should have been removed immediately, he said.
“The publication did everything by the law in terms of the correction they published, even admitting that they regret the error at the end of their correction,” he testified. “The biggest issue I noticed with the process is that initially, after publishing the correction and acknowledging that they were in error, legally, they didn’t need to go back and edit the defaming statements in the past article.”
Editors did it anyway. They just weren’t fast enough, Tyler Harbick said.
“For months, the article stayed up with the defamatory statements,” he said.
The bill requires that statements deemed defamatory be immediately scrubbed from a digital outlet’s website — or that any corrections or retractions be posted immediately on the website’s homepage and any page containing the statement.
“The bill addresses the permanent nature of archived material on websites,” Rep. Harbick said. “This is particularly important because such archived materials may form the basis of information created via artificial intelligence.”
Harbick defended extending from 20 to 60 days for offended parties to decide whether or not they’ve been defamed and demand a correction.
“It may take a little bit of time to find out that information that was written about you was incorrect,” he said.
Jane Titchenal of Keizer, an activist who promotes local journalism, told Street Roots she’s sorry she missed the deadline to testify against the bill.
She said the time extension makes little sense.
Defamation under the law means a person’s reputation has been damaged to the extent that it can be objectively measured in court (by such metrics as loss of income or standing within the community).
“Establishing defamation should be a high bar,” Titchenal said. “Generally speaking, if you have to hunt for defamatory statements because you’re not sure whether or not you’ve been defamed, your case is off to a rocky start.”
Although Rep. Harbick and his son were the only people who offered verbal testimony at the hearing, nine people submitted written testimony.
Thena Larteri Lyons summed up the general tone.
“This should include an automatic lawsuit to be paid by the scum who defamed the innocent party,” the Brookings resident wrote.
Rachel Freed of Bend wrote in her submitted testimony that the bill promotes accountability in the news media.
“By requiring a process for individuals to seek corrections or retractions of defamatory statements, the bill encourages responsible reporting and fosters a culture of accuracy in journalism,” Freed wrote.
Sufficient legal frameworks already exist, said Bagwell, McMinnville News-Register opinion editor and longtime Linfield University journalism professor.
“Libel statutes already regulate both the timing and placement of formal retractions,” Bagwell said. “They do so simply by offering an enticing incentive, not by issuing an order turning a free press into a captive press subject to the whims of its government overlords.”
Titchenal said she finds talk about legislation holding news organizations “accountable” deeply troubling.
“The press should hold the government accountable, not the other way around,” she said. “As Justice Hugo Black so wisely said, ‘The press is to serve the governed, not the government.’”
Titchenal was quoting Black’s opinion in the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States, in which the high court rejected President Richard Nixon’s attempt to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Other Supreme Court rulings could be used to challenge House Bill 3564, she added.
In the 1974 case Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, the justices struck down a Florida “right-of-reply” statute that required newspapers to offer free space for rebuttals from people who felt defamed.
The court ruled that the Florida law violated the First Amendment by requiring newspapers to publish content against their will. Affirming a lower court decision, the justices concluded that dictating what a newspaper must print was no different from dictating what it cannot print.
“The First Amendment erects a virtually insurmountable barrier between government and the print media,” wrote Justice Byron White.
“A newspaper or magazine is not a public utility subject to ‘reasonable’ governmental regulation in matters affecting the exercise of journalistic judgment as to what shall be printed,” White added.
“Regardless of how beneficent-sounding the purposes of controlling the press might be, we prefer the power of reason as applied through public discussion,” he said.
Titchenal said Republicans support a president who made (according to a Washington Post tally) 30,573 false or misleading statements during his first administration.
“And he’s been racking them up ever since,” she said. “He defames everyone from war heroes to federal judges. Why isn’t anyone demanding he apologize and issue corrections? It’s because it’s easier to make the press obey the law than it is the president. That says a lot about our society, doesn’t it?”
House Bill 3564 “ensures that those who publish information have a responsibility to verify their claims and correct any errors that may harm others,” Freed wrote in her testimony. “This legislation is a vital step toward promoting responsible journalism.”
Journalists have already accepted that responsibility and take it very seriously, Bagwell said. They don’t need the government to enforce it, he added.
“Never in our long history has the judicial branch allowed the executive branch to dictate what the nation’s free press may or may not print,” said Bagwell. “Let’s save the courts the trouble on this bill and bury it now without further delay.”
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This article appears in April 2, 2025.