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Someone's suddenly worried about a ruinous defamation suit that could put them out of business. https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1341078245878472706
2/ I'll add to this that the expansion and abuse of litigation against new orgs is one of the worst developments of recent years, driven to a great degree by Trump and those around him. But what has happened here is a textbook example of what post-Sullivan defamation ...
3/ law is meant to combat. Here you have news organizations willfully spreading claims that they certainly know are lies or are entirely indifferent to their veracity. In many cases there is not a legally definable victim. Hugo Chavez doesn't have a cause of action ...
4/ American democracy doesn't have standing. But these private corporations do. Given what I do for a living, given that I have to make final calls about high stakes stories or evaluate risk and balance journalistic mission vs journalistic survival, the idea of news orgs ...
5/ being sued out of existence is a terrifying thought. But this story shows things that any legitimate news org is aghast at. Everything legit outfit, every outfit that takes defamation law seriously does so much more than carrying if what they publish is true. There ...
6/ are countless smaller steps you need to take to button up the evidence on which certain claims are made, the fairness of emphasis, the balance between news relevant information and information that can damage or constitute invasions of privacy which are not ...
7/ justified by news value, etc etc. These are not just doing good journalism they are necessary for the preservation of the news outlet itself. Watching a news outfit repeatedly make claims which are obviously false and have zero evidentiary backing honestly just makes me ...
8/ sick when I think about how much real journalists sweat this stuff, how much real news organizations spend so much on lawyers and layers of editing to avoid good faith errors. Willful lying like this at scale is just disgraceful and it merits a real reckoning.
