Two days after a Florida state court ordered the Pulitzer Prize Board into video discovery, the docket has not produced a new deposition transcript or a stay motion. The paper filed yesterday's account of the Carroll and Merida appearances and read the migration as the press-freedom thread moving from credential rules to discovery rules. [1] Day two of the post-deposition window — the period in which transcripts ordinarily reach public filing or counsel moves to seal them — has closed without either entry.

The silence is mechanical, not editorial. President Trump's defamation suit against the Pulitzer Board originated in a 2022 statement defending the 2018 reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election. [2] The September trial date is fixed. Between the depositions of former Associated Press executive editor Kathleen Carroll and former Los Angeles Times editor Kevin Merida and that trial, the schedule sits in the slow part of civil litigation: review, redaction objections, and motions in limine that do not generate same-day press.

What the empty docket leaves the press-freedom-wartime thread is a counterfactual. Two days of additional silence do not move the suit; they extend the period in which the editorial decisions of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize Board sit, on a transcript, available to a single litigant before they are available to the public. The Pulitzer Board has demanded discovery of Trump's tax returns and medical records — discovery he has avoided in other suits. [1] That side of the request has produced no Friday filing either.

The press-freedom-wartime thread the paper has watched accumulates a calendar of date-stamped silences: VOA injunction status, the WHCA's open boundary, the CBS Radio sign-off. The Pulitzer suit is the venue where the question of what an editor can be compelled to say under oath sits in pretrial motion. Day two passed. The transcript did not.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin