Month: November 2009 Page 3 of 4
Excellent guidance from noted First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche.
Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts, offers further analysis of how the state’s anti-SLAPP law would modify libel law if journalist-activist Fredda Hollander wins her appeal, now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. (SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” and the anti-SLAPP law is aimed at preventing people from abusing the legal system by hauling activists into court.) Wunsch writes in part:
The defendant, the petitioner, may have made some misstatements that are harmful to the plaintiff’s reputation, but in order to give some breathing space to the right to petition, the law provides that as long as the petitioning wasn’t baseless, the SLAPP suit should be thrown out. Some people might think that is unfair but because society benefits when people aren’t afraid to get involved in local government issues, the statute gives them some extra protection.
To which I would add that though anti-SLAPP protection for journalists might offer them some extra protection against libel suits, the overall effect would probably be slight.
In most cases, I suspect, the person bringing the allegedly abusive suit (in Hollander’s case, North End developer Steven Fustolo) would be deemed a public figure. And under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 Times v. Sullivan standard, a public figure can’t win a libel case unless he’s able to prove that the person he’s suing made false, defamatory statements knowing they weren’t true, or showing reckless disregard for the truth.
My standard disclosure: Hollander paid me to write an affidavit on her behalf at an earlier stage of her case.
Ralph Ranalli of Beat the Press has an interview with Boston Globe feature writer Joanna Weiss on her impending move to the editorial and op-ed pages. Weiss tells Ranalli:
I’ll still be writing about pop culture, but from a different direction. I think it’s exciting; it’s a different kind of forum. And I’ll reach a different kind of reader that didn’t necessarily read my TV coverage.
As for Weiss’ expectation that she’ll get some pushback from readers who’d prefer a traditional op-ed-page columnist, I have some advice: Don’t worry. There aren’t that many of them. And, at this point, they’re all 70 and older.
Freelance journalist Justin Rice has launched a site called BPSsports to cover athletics in the Boston Public Schools. Rice explains that one of his goals is “to provide an outlet for local college and high school students to gain valuable journalism experience.”
Adam Gaffin is on the case as well.
My piece for the Guardian on the Fake AP Stylebook has now been posted. Here is my earlier interview with the co-founders, Mark Hale and Ken Lowery.
At this point, it’s just depressing. Voters in Maine last night overturned their state’s same-sex-marriage law by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent.
The very idea that we should have the right to vote on whether our neighbors are fully human is offensive. The fact that the latest expression of “no, they’re not” comes from live-and-let-live Maine only makes it worse.
“God has given us this victory,” the Rev. Bob Emrich is quoted as saying in the Bangor Daily News. Perhaps KnowThyNeighbor.org will tell us how much cash the Big Guy ponied up.
Better news from Washington State.