California city bans news distribution on most city property

The Fullerton, California, City Council voted 3-2 on May 6, 2025, to keep a ban in place on news racks in city facilities.

The ban was instituted in April after local blog Friends For Fullerton’s Future asked for a news rack to be installed in the Fullerton City Hall lobby for a planned print edition, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

A news rack in City Hall has long distributed a community newspaper, the Fullerton Observer, and a student newspaper from California State University, Fullerton, the Daily Titan. But on April 1, the council majority voted to restrict distributed materials in the City Hall lobby to those published by the city, government agencies, public utilities and select educational institutions.

In a letter to the city council, Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which the Tracker is a project, and the First Amendment Coalition wrote that “The ban sends the message, whether intended or not, that the city is hostile to the free press and discourages criticism of its policies, preferring that residents only read government-approved messaging.”

“Press freedom means little if people don’t have access to the journalism they want to read,” the organizations warned.

On April 15, Council member Shana Charles, who had originally voted for the ban, asked the council to consider rescinding it. At the May 6 City Council meeting, she said she had changed her opinion after learning that bans in nearby towns differed from Fullerton’s more than she had been initially led to believe by the city attorney’s office, the LA Times reported after the council meeting.

“We would be enacting a new policy, something that nobody else in this county is doing, possibly nationwide,” Charles said. “I just don’t think it makes any sense for us to try and suppress community newspapers.”

During nearly an hour of public comment before the May 6 vote was held, all but one community member spoke against the ban. Council member Ahmad Zahra, the lone vote against the ban in April, alleged that it was retaliatory against the Fullerton Observer.

But their opposition was overruled by the mayor and two council members, who voted to keep the ban in place. Council member Jamie Valencia, the only council member to speak in favor of the ban, did so for less than a minute.

Fullerton’s City Hall is a “nonpartisan building,” she said. “This is for city matters and nonpartisan issues, so now we have an ordinance in place.”

Fullerton Observer owner Saskia Kennedy agreed with Zahra that the ban seemed targeted at her paper. She told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in an emailed statement that the council vote was “deeply troubling, though not surprising,” and that she was particularly concerned about the impact of the ban on student journalists at the Daily Titan.

“They miss out on crucial exposure that would help them grow as reporters,” Kennedy wrote. “Becoming a skilled journalist requires feedback and critique from the community.”

Kennedy added that print copies of the paper at City Hall are vital for the “numerous individuals in our community who have not embraced the internet and still rely on print media for information. Furthermore, people with disabilities, both physical and financial, depend on free newspapers for access to important news, and this ban limits their options.”

Friends for Fullerton’s Future, whose request for a news rack reportedly prompted the ban, did not respond to a request for comment and for information on how they planned to distribute their print edition. A post on the blog after the vote said of the ban, “Somehow a content neutral policy of excluding news outlets from the City Hall lobby was construed as an all-out assault on the free press and freedom of speech, yadda yadda.”