''The Saturday Press'' was the name of a newspaper, established in 1927 by Jay M. Near and Howard A. Guilford, and published in

Minneapolis, Minnesota Minneapolis is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 429,954 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the state's List of cities in Minnesota, most populous city. Locat ...

. The newspaper was run by Jay Near, who was an allegedly

anti-Semitic Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...

, anti-labor and

anti-Communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when th ...

small-time editor. Daniel B. Moskowitz describes it as having "traded in

sensationalism In journalism and mass media, sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emoti ...

, filling columns with a mishmash of pioneering exposes of public corruption and totally unsubstantiated calumny." Floyd B. Olson, the future governor of

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

, brought a suit against Near and Guilford because their newspaper had an overly anti-Semitic tone, which Olsen claimed was a violation of the Public Nuisance Law, also known as the Minnesota Gag Law, of 1925. The scandal sheet published countless exposes until it was shut down in 1927 by the Gag Law. In 1931, the historic U.S. Supreme Court case '' Near v. Minnesota'' struck the statute as unconstitutional.

Prior restraint Prior restraint (also referred to as prior censorship or pre-publication censorship) is censorship imposed, usually by a government or institution, on expression, that prohibits particular instances of expression. It is in contrast to censorship ...

laws have never fared well in courts since, including the case of the

Pentagon Papers The ''Pentagon Papers'', officially titled ''Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force'', is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States in the Vietnam War, United States' political and militar ...

. The paper re-appeared from 1932 to 1936, when Jay Near died in relative obscurity.

References

External links

Text of ''Near v. Minnesota''
at Findlaw. Defunct newspapers published in Minnesota {{Minnesota-newspaper-stub