Protest in Hong Kong, March 2023, held behind “crime tape.” (Associated Press)
According to the Hong Kong Democracy Council, authorities have jailed more than 1,500 political prisoners since 2019, half of whom are under the age of 25. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/01/hong-kong-china-crackdown-democracy/
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This segment of The Problem with John Stewart was broadcast before the Fox – Dominion settlement announced April 19, 2023.
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Federal agencies will fight online harassment across four main lines of effort, the Biden administration said March 3, 2023. These are prevention, survivor support, accountability, and research, according to a White House announcement.
Since its launch, the Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse has heard from hundreds of stakeholders—survivors, advocates, parents, educators, law enforcement, medical and legal professionals, and researchers—who discussed the significant harm caused by online harassment and abuse.
The Task Force is part of Biden’s call to action in the State of Union for solutions to address online safety, health, privacy, and accountability.
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Alex Jones (Wikipedia).
Alex Jones is bankrupt. The host and owner of the far-right fake news conspiracy-peddling website “Infowars.com” owed $1.5 billion dollars by the end of 2022 to people harmed by his lies about the massacre at an elementary school in Sandy Hook CT a decade beforehand.
The cascade of losses in libel suits began with a Texas jury’s Aug. 5, 2022 decision to award $50 million in actual and punitive damages to parents of the massacre’s victims. Four more libel suits in Texas and Connecticut also ended with guilty verdicts and heavy fines.
Jones’ lies about Sandy Hook began within hours of the massacre, and were frequently repeated since then. He falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre of 2012 was a hoax and that the parents of the children killed at the school were “crisis actors.” As a result, Sandy Hook parents were subjected to harassment and other damages, on top of the profound grief of losing their children. One family has had to move 10 times to avoid Jones’ followers.
Jones’ attorneys argued that the First Amendment protects his right to make mistakes and that other people, not Jones, were to blame for the harassment.
But it’s too late for that argument. Jones already lost the first Texas libel suit by refusing to cooperate with the court, and default judgments were issued. The only question in the Texas case and others involves the amount of damages. Continue reading
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By Asheley R. Landrum, Texas Tech University
More than twenty years ago (1998), images of staggering cattle and descriptions of brains resembling Swiss cheese became associated with one of the most popular television programs of the day when Texas Panhandle cattlemen sued “The Oprah Winfrey Show” for defamation under Texas’ “veggie libel law.” They claimed the program’s negative portrayal of their business caused a steep decline of beef prices.
On the surface, this conflict looked like a battle between an industry and the TV producers who portrayed it negatively. But at its heart was some complicated science that had the potential to scare the public and be sensationalized by the media.
Today’s practitioners of science communication grapple with the difficulty of transmitting science information via the media to a lay audience. This 1998 trial serves as a rare public case study documenting the media’s imperfect attempts to clarify the science of mad cow disease in the midst of a celebrity spectacle.
Ultimately Oprah won the legal case. But how did the public’s understanding of the science fare?
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Sarah Palin, 2012, by Gage Skidmore, CC / Wikipedia.
By Bill Kovarik
Published in The Conversation, Feb. 15, 2022 under a Creative Commons license for non-profit republication.
To the numerous challenges facing the U.S. media in recent years, add a libel case against The New York Times – lost by Sarah Palin, but now seemingly headed to appeal and perhaps on to the highest court in the land.
On Feb. 15, 2022, a jury rejected Palin’s claim. As it happened, its verdict was more or less moot. The presiding judge had already said he would dismiss the case on the grounds that the former Alaska governor’s legal team had failed to reach the bar for proving she had been defamed.
A Times editor admitted a mistake in suggesting in a 2017 opinion piece that there was a link between Palin’s rhetoric and a mass shooting. But under the so-called Sullivan standard – a rule in place for nearly 60 years that makes it difficult for public figures to successfully sue for defamation – neither the jury nor the judge considered the error significant enough for Palin to win her case.
But in reaching his decision in the Palin case, the federal judge suggested that it was likely not to be the end of the matter – indeed, an appeal is expected.
And that has defenders of a free press worried. Legal scholars note that recent opinions by Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch favor overturning the Sullivan standard – a move that would take away a key protection for the press against libel suits by vindictive public officials. Continue reading
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George Orwell, journalist and author of “1984”
“Big Tech is not the Ministry of Truth.”
Or at least, so says the Attorney General of Alabama who has invited citizens to file formal complaints if they have been censored on social media.
“It should concern us all when platforms that hold such tremendous power and influence over information wield that power in contradiction of—and with undisguised disdain for—the foundational American principles of free speech and freedom of the press,” says Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. “The censorship campaign currently being waged by giant corporate oligarchs like Facebook and Twitter is, in a word, un-American.”
You may recall that in Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth controls news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Of course, truth is only what the ministry says it is. Speaking up for some idea that is not “true” is punishable by death or indefinite imprisonment.
But it’s just a novel. It may go without saying, but here in the US at least, nobody’s life is on the line and nobody is headed for Siberia for some crackpot Q-nut idea they want to shout to the world.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter have blocked or even banned a few US citizens who insist on deadly lies, for example, that the last election was fraudulent; that vaccines don’t work; that the virus is a hoax; that masks are the “mark of the beast;” and so on. Facebook and Twitter are trying to apply a standard of human dignity and provable truth through their terms of service.
Don’t like it? Fine. Go to the competition. There are dozens of new social media platforms, according to a July 2021 article in Forbes. You don’t even have to pay for a subscription. Jeez.
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By Bill Kovarik (“How a silent movie informs the current debate over the right to be forgotten.” CC license. The Conversation)
In 1915, Gabrielle Darley killed a New Orleans man who had tricked her into a life of prostitution. She was tried, acquitted of murder and within a few years was living a new life under her married name, Melvin. Then a blockbuster movie, “The Red Kimono,” splashed her sensational story across America’s silver screens.
The 1925 film used Darley’s real name and details of her life taken from transcripts of the murder trial. She sued for invasion of privacy and won.
In deciding in favor of Darley, a California court said that people have a right to rehabilitation. “We should permit [people] to continue in the path of rectitude rather than throw [them] back into a life of shame or crime,” the court said. It is a sentiment that is harder to put into practice today, when information is much more readily available. Nonetheless, policymakers and media outlets are looking at the issue.
As a scholar of media history and law, I see Darley’s story as more than an interesting slice of legal and cinematic history. Her case provides an early example of how private people struggle to escape their pasts and how the idea of privacy is linked to rehabilitation.
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By Bill Kovarik
Published in The Conversation, Jan. 15, 2021
Creative Commons license for non-profit republication.
In speeches filled with hatred and falsehoods, a public figure attacks his enemies 
and calls for marches on Washington. Then, after one particularly virulent address, private media companies close down his channels of communication, prompting consternation from his supporters and calls for a code of conduct to filter out violent rhetoric.
Sound familiar? Well, this was 1938, and the individual in question was Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences. The firms silencing him were the broadcasters of the day.
As a media historian, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have silenced false claims of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by silencing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters.
Coughlin’s Detroit ministry had grown up with radio, and, as his sermons grew more political, he began calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a liar, a betrayer and a double-crosser. His fierce rhetoric fueled rallies and letter-writing campaigns for a dozen right-wing causes, from banking policy to opposing Russian communism. At the height of his popularity, an estimated 30 million Americans listened to his Sunday sermons.
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The last time a sitting president sued a newspaper for libel, laughter broke out on the floor of the US Senate.
That was December 15, 1908, when president Teddy Roosevelt sued the New York World newspaper after it linked him to corruption over the Panama Canal. Roosevelt ordered federal attorneys to file criminal libel suits against newspapers all over the country. Democrats were outraged, once they stopped laughing. One US attorney resigned in protest rather than prosecute Teddy’s critics for libel.
The main target of the suits, New York World newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, famously said: “He cannot muzzle the World.” (See Pulitzer’s Reply Dec. 16, 1908)
Roosevelt’s lawsuit, US v Press Publishing, used to be considered the “last gasp” of seditious libel.
The US Supreme Court didn’t think much of the suit, handing down a ruling in 1911 that was only two pages long. The ruling ignored the merits of the case and simply sustained an objection by Press Publishing (the owner of the NY World) that “the court has no jurisdiction in this case, because there is no statute of the United States authorizing the prosecution.”
The case was thought to be a First Amendment landmark at the time, but it is barely remembered in communications law textbooks today. After all, what sitting president would lower himself to file such a suit? Even outright allegations of murder did not tempt President Bill Clinton to wield that cudgel against critics like Jerry Falwell. What president would be so foolish as to sue for libel just because a newspaper published a disagreeable opinion?
Which brings us to Donald Trump, the president who defied expectations. Tump sued the New York Times on Feb. 26, 2020, and the Washington Post, on March 3, 2020, for an apparently disagreeable opinion about Trump’s relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. In the suit, Trump claimed that the Times knowingly published the supposedly false charge that there was a “quid pro quo” with the Russians in return for their help in the 2016 election. (The plaintiff’s petition can be read here.)
This “quid pro quo” was described in an op-ed written by former New York Times editor Max Frankel and published March 27, 2019. In the op-ed, Frankel rejected small concerns about “collusion” with Russia in the Trump campaign. The much larger issue, he said, involved the relationship between Trump and Putin.
(UPDATE: The story continues but the court dismissed Trump’s lawsuit in March, 2021).
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