defamation

On the ABC $16 Million Libel Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ABC News agreed last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” broadcast in March, in which he repeatedly said, while interviewing Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had, in fact, been found liable for sexual assault but not rape, and this had been well-publicized at the time.

Trump sued ABC, and I assumed it was a nuisance suit made for effect rather than in expectation of winning. In fact, I regarded it as this close to being frivolous. That it wasn’t was proven by the settlement.

News media fans (I am not one) and journalism advocates are apoplectic over the settlement, believing that it weakens the “power of the press” to distort, lie and manipulate public opinion as the news media has been doing increasingly and shamelessly in one direction on the ideological scale for more than two decades. Good. The news media is careless, reckless, arrogant and unprofessional, as well as unaccountable. If the ABC defeat makes them a little bit more wary and careful to be sure of their facts, it is to everyone’s benefit, including journalists.

It couldn’t have happened to a better target than Stephanopoulos. He is a partisan hack, and never should have been allowed to pretend to be a journalist after serving as one of Bill Clinton’s henchmen. The Times v. Sullivan case requires that a journalist must demonstrate actual malice toward a public figure before a defamation suit gets past the First Amendment, and in most cases miscreants like George are saved by their own incompetence. I was certain that he would be saved this time— ah, rape, sexual assault, tomato-tomahto, who cares, what’s the difference. Of course, everyone knows except maybe Ethics Alarms vigilante press defender “A Friend” that Stephanopoulos and about 90% of his colleagues are hostile to Donald Trump, but general antipathy is usually not enough to show malice.

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Whoa! “The View” Has Had To Issue 36 “Legal Notes” So Far This Year

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The imposition of “legal notes” on “The View’s” panel of bigots, incompetents, liars and fools received a lot of attention last week because there were four of them, as ABC’s lawyers were quick to force clarifications on potentially defamatory statements by Sunny Hostin and the rest of the coven. Because I don’t watch the show ( because anyone who does is risking permanent brain damage or a stroke), I assumed this was a new development. The indispensable Axis media watchdog Media Research Center, which monitors this leftist clown act so I don’t have to, reports that in fact Whoopi’s gang has had to read 36 such disclaimers so far in 2024.

The ladies of “The View” seem to think this is funny. It’s not. The fact that so much of what they bleat on this daily show, which is, incredibly, categorized as a news program on ABC, has to be corrected in real time lest the network be subject to law suits is indisputable evidence that the cast is incompetent, lazy and vicious, and that ABC is irresponsible to allow them to remain on the air.

Condign justice may be coming Disney’s way: ABC News is being sued by Trump over on-air comments made on “Good Morning America” by co-host (and Clinton-allied hack) George Stephanopoulos when he kept asking Rep. Nancy Mace to comment on how Trump had been “found liable for rape.” Trump was not found liable for rape in the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll even after New York stacked the legal deck against him as part of the Democrats’ lawfare strategy. ABC’s lawyers have so far failed to get the lawsuit dismissed and it is entering the deposition phase.

Asks PJ Media columnist Rick Moran regarding “The View” panel, “Is it that they feel so entitled that the truth shouldn’t matter, or are they so stupid they think that just because they believe something, it must be so?”

I’m pretty sure the answer is “Both.”

Trump Sues ABC and Stephanopoulos For Defamation. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.

Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.

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Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh) Roy Moore!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Is Roy Moore the most repulsive public figure to warrant an Ethics Alarms “Don’t Make Me Defend…” posts? Oooh, tough call. I checked: the all-time leader in such posts is Donald Trump, with Joe Biden a distant second. Then we have Jack Phillips (the anti-gay baker), Sean Spicer, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Kathy Griffin, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Joy Behar, Alex Jones, Lenny Dykstra, Woody Allen, Stacey Abrams, Chris Cuomo (twice!), Nicki Minaj, Tucker Carlson, Nancy Pelosi and Pete Rose. That’s tough and nauseating competition. What do you think?

But I digress. The occasion for my rallying to Roy’s side is the $8.2 million verdict in his favor in his defamation suit against the Senate Majority PAC for a negative TV ad characterizing some of the sexual misconduct accusations against him that helped derail Moore’s failed 2017 U.S. Senate bid in Alabama.

Senate Majority PAC funded a group called Highway 31 that ran a $4 million advertising blitz against Moore, concentrating on the accounts of his pursuit of teenage girls early in his career when he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. It is beyond reasonable dispute that Moore was creepy with young girls, even Joe Biden-like. However, defamation is when one states as fact something for which there is no factual evidence and that harms another’s reputation.

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Just Because Someone Is An Idiot Doesn’t Mean It’s Ethical To Make A Fool Out Of Him: The Roy Moore Libel Suit Dismissal

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New York refused to revive a lawsuit filed by former Alabama Chief Justice and failed Senate candidate from Alabama Roy Moore (and his wife) against  comedian comedian Sasha Baron Cohen. Moore v. Baron Cohen  had its genesis when the “Borat” satirist and actor tricked Moore into traveling to Washington, D.C. to receive a fictional award for supporting Israel and to be interviewed for Israeli TV. It was all a set-up to ridicule Moore on an installment of Cohen’s Showtime production, “Who Is America?”

Cohen presented himself to Moore as an Israeli anti-terrorism expert with a high-tech military intelligence device ( he’s holding it above) that supposedly was able to detect pedophiles. Moore’s Senate run was crushed by credible allegations that he had sought relationships with underage teenage girls: the episode of the program in which the interview aired was introduced with news clips reporting those allegations, including one involving a fourteen-year-old girl at the time. In a cringeworthy confrontation, Cohen’s character waved “the pedophile-detector” over Moore as it beeped loudly. Moore then walked out of the “interview.” Moore and his wife sued for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Former New York Times Editor James Bennet

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Under oath!

” It’s extremely important for the editorial board to have a reputation to call balls and strikes without partisanship.

Former NYT editor James Bennet, who was responsible for the editorial now the object of a defamation lawsuit by Sarah Palin.

Wow. If that’s “extremely important,” the Times sure is doing a lousy job achieving its alleged objective. It was just this week when the Editorial slot in the paper was taken up by a piece headlined (in the print edition), “Can the Republican Party Be Saved?” (online headline: “When the Storming of the Capitol Becomes ‘Legitimate Political Discourse.“) The second headline is deceit: as I pointed out in the previous post, the recent GOP resolution condemning the two Republican House members who voted for an illegal Democratic Party impeachment and who are fully participating in a rigged partisan investigation designed to find a way to lock up Donald Trump and as many of his supporters as possible, never asserts that the Jan. 6 riot was “legitimate political discourse.” Never mind: that’s the latest false narrative fad, like the “Trump called white supremacists ‘fine people'” smear that one can still hear one’s Facebook friends cite to this day. Of course the Times is running with it.

It was the print headline that really struck me, though. This week, polls came out showing that Joe Biden’s support had slipped into the thirties with no end to the free-fall in sight, and that the Republicans were surging further ahead in the Congressional mid-terms survey. And the non-partisan Times’ question is whether Republicans can be saved! Only a thoroughly biased group of editors wouldn’t perceive how bad that kind of tunnel vision makes the paper look. But bias makes you stupid. In its most extreme cases, victims can’t even see how biased they are. Continue reading →

Not Just An Unethical Statement, But An Unbelievable One: The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There’s nothing quite like starting the day with a head explosion.

A New York Times story today about the start of Sarah Palin’s libel suit against the New York Times—Conflict of interest? What conflict of interest?—contained this astounding statement:

The Times has denied those allegations, rebutting the notions that it would ever knowingly print something false…

The thrust of the Times objective, unbiased analysis of the lawsuit against the Times is that “Ms. Palin’s evidence is weak,” but she might win anyway, thus creating one more danger to democracy by weakening freedom of the press.

The evidence is weak? The Supreme Court decision in The New York Times Company v. Sullivan held that for public officials to prove defamation, they had to show not only that a news story was false and harmed their reputation, but that the story resulted from “actual malice,” involving printing a claim or allegation with “reckless disregard for the truth” or knowing it was false. Palin is suing because a Times editorial in 2017 stated that when Rep. Gabriel Giffords was shot by a lunatic in 2011, the crime had “clear[ly]“ been incited by a map circulated by  Palin’s political action committee showing 20 congressional districts that Republicans were hoping to win, including the one held by Giffords, labeled by stylized cross hairs. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/21/2022: Christmas’s And Meat Loaf’s End Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Meat Loaf has died. The hilariously theatrical pop singer with the big voice was responsible for one of the great ethics songs: “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.” It packed almost everything into one epic musical journey: temptation, non-ethical considerations vs. ethics, betrayal, consequences and cosmic retribution.

***

Absent a last-minute reprieve or a relapse of whatever it is that I’ve been battling, this looks like the final day for our especially lovely, inspiring Christmas tree. I always feel like I’m making the world a little meaner and less hopeful when I take it down. This post, from three years ago, still stands.

***

In U.S. ethics history, January 21 stands for one of the more significant pardons in American Presidential annals, because in 1977 Jimmy Carter pardoned all those young men, hundreds of thousands of them, who had fled to Canada rather than risk being drafted to fight in Vietnam. (Only half came back. I am tempted to say, “Good!,” but I won’t…) Those who left as a matter of principle and those who ran off because they wouldn’t have fought for their country under any circumstances (this was the era of “Better Red than Dead,” after all) were treated the same. It was a utilitarian trade-off, and whether the President’s decision was unethical (my Vietnam vet friends said it made them feel like suckers) or ethical (it definitely helped heal the national divisions over that misguided conflict), it was certainly brave and consequential. For example, that single act probably killed the draft as much as anything else.

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Feel free to debate that issue here; I’m not up to it today myself. There won’t be the usual Friday Open Forum because there was one just two days ago (and it’s still open!). Full disclosure: in my fevered state, I really thought it was Friday when it was Wednesday.

1. This video is worrisome if it’s genuine, and it may not be. A young woman freaks out after getting a positive Wuhan variant test result, and acts as if she’s been sentenced to die on the rack and wheel. I fear this is what two years of politically-driven pandemic hysteria is turning our rising generations into: cowards, whiners, phobics and weenies. Her tearful lament ““The coolest characteristic about myself is that I haven’t gotten it!” is particularly nauseating. Continue reading →

“The Queen’s Gambit” Gambit

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

the-queens-gambit-8b97b1d

In the final episode (mercifully) of the inexplicably popular Netflix series“The Queen’s Gambit,” an announcer delivering chess commentary while the show’s annoying fictional heroine, portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy (above right), competes in a climactic tournament in Moscow says,“The only unusual thing about her, really, is her sex, and even that’s not unique in Russia.There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”

That wasn’t true. Nona Gaprindashvili, the first woman to be named a grandmaster, faced and defeated many male players. Now 80 years old and living in Tbilisi, Georgia, Nona is furious about the false representation of her career. She’s suing Netflix in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, seeking millions of dollars in damages for what her lawyers claim is a “devastating falsehood, undermining and degrading her accomplishments before an audience of many millions.”

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Noon Ethics Munchies, 7/14/2021: On Cuba, Big Lies, Roy Moore, and More [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Munchies

1. The President gets a cheap shot...Commenting on Joe Biden’s generally hysterical speech about “voter suppression,” “Bonchie” writes on the conservative blog Red State,

“Of note here is that Biden is channeling Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by using the phrase “big lie” to disparage Republicans who have concerns about the 2020 election. Yet, despite the phrase’s murderous, anti-Semitic past, the president seems to have no problem saying it repeatedly. In doing so, he echoed CNN’s Jake Tapper and others who have also been fond of the phrase.”

There is nothing wrong with using the phrase or the description. The device was championed by both Goebbels and Hitler, and is an accurate description of a propaganda tactic, an unethical but powerful one, used by both the Right and the Left. Whether the description is used fairly in any particular case is a separate issue. “Big Lies” is a very accurate description of the assault by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media against Donald Trump—can you think of a better one?—which is why Ethics Alarms used it here and elsewhere.

What would be fair to note is that Biden has often been an eager employer of Goebbels’ favorite trick himself…as noted in this post.

2. Does anyone understand why Democrats are trying to downplay the current Cuban protests against the Communist government? This makes no sense to me. Thousands of anti-regime protesters took to the streets across the island over the weekend, waving American flags and chanting “Freedom!” and anti-government slogans. Cuba has been a repressive Communist regime since Fidel Castro pulled his bait and switch with the U.S. in 1959, but the most extreme elements in the Democratic Party, the proto-Marxists, have always thrown Cuba metaphorical kisses, like Michael Moore. Barack Obama reversed decades of U.S. policy by opening relations with Cuba without requiring any human rights concessions in return. One would think an outbreak of democracy on the island would be viewed as a good thing, but Biden’s paid liar, Jen Psaki, absurdly explained that the reason for the protests was “concern about rising COVID cases, deaths, and medicine shortages” rather than political oppression.

While Republicans have immediately announced their support for the Cuban people, Reps. Bobby Rush (D., Ill.), Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.), Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Gwen Moore (D., Wis.) and the more 70 members of Congress, including “The Squad,” of course, signed a letter asking Biden to lift Trump sanctions Cuba in March. They have not had any comment on the demonstrations so far.

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