By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005

For First Amendment and civil liberties fans, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.  It’s time for the New England Muzzle Awards, that Fourth of July tradition in which I highlight outrages against the First Amendment that took place in the six-state region during the previous 12 months.

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It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.) After leaving GBH, I skipped 2023, but since then have been writing up individual Muzzles throughout the year rather than waiting for an annual roundup. So welcome to the 27th annual edition.

This year I thought I would try something different. Rather than simply listing the Muzzles I’ve awarded since July 2025 (although I’m still doing that), I asked Claude AI for some additional candidates. I did not ask Claude to write them for me, and I’m relying on citations from reliable news sources. I simply used Claude as a more sophisticated way of searching than what DuckDuckGo or Google offers these days. So I’ll start with a few that I’m presenting here for the first time.

Kudos, as always, to my friends Harvey Silverglate, who conceived of this annual feature all these years ago, and Peter Kadzis, who edited all 25 editions that appeared in the Phoenix and at GBH News. They were inspired by the Jefferson Muzzles, which no longer are awarded. Here in New England, though, their spirit lives on.

Continue reading “The 2026 New England Muzzle Awards: Spotlighting the enemies of free speech and expression”

Every year around this time, I take note of Independence Day by writing about outrages against freedom of speech that unfolded in New England during the previous year. It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix, and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.)

For the past several years I’ve been writing up Muzzles as they come in rather than waiting to do an annual roundup. I skipped writing a roundup altogether in 2023, so I guess this is the 27th annual edition of the New England Muzzle Awards.

This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.