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What are your thoughts on an actual apology from WaPo? Would apologizing hurt them in the lawsuit? I’m sure the statement they published went through lots of reading and revising by lawyers.
What a bunch of self-serving, mendacious nonsense. And it’s behind the paywall on the WP site. That’s a bad move as well.
I hope the kid ends up owning the WaPo.
If good lawyers pushed Loser Pays legislation to rid us of frivolous lawsuits and the tremendous costs those torts add to everything, I might care more. Instead, we get endless protection rackets and ever more regulations justifying the hiring of more lawyers.
Your professional anecdotes are welcome.
Well, following the AA model – when you have injured someone as a result of your addiction (hating young men and faithful Christians is surely and addiction) you must make a personal apology acknowledging your wrong. AND MAKE AMENDS. Seems as if a public (not behind the paywall or published in the Personals section) apology (an actual We’re very sorry we maliciously misrepresented your behaviour and maligned your reputations….) is only the first step. Next step the Amends step. This strikes me as too similar to what your favorite 4 year old says when she belts her brother. Cue mumbled “sorrryyy” as she walks away.
Totally agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if the non-apology “note” is basically WaPo testing the waters to see if we’ve forgotten about all this yet. I hope they get the pants sued off them.
I completely agree on the right and moral course. I’m just wondering about the ramifications in court.
Lawyers are like politicians , mine is great but the rest of them suck.
I agree entirely. I have too many anecdotes to choose just one, but count me among those who see lawsuits (at least the many, many frivolous lawsuits) as being the scourge of the Earth. Yes, I would like to see the WaPo lose the $250 million paid by Bezos, but not by means of a windfall verdict to the Covington students. Rather, I would like to see the WaPo’s readers cancel their subscriptions and the paper blow away like dust in the wind.
The Covington students were wronged, without a doubt. By the twitter mob, by misleading and grossly negligent media accounts from outlets all over the land and the world, and certainly by the criminals who made death threats and otherwise harassed the students. If the WaPo had been silent on the matter, would the students have suffered one whit less? I doubt it. The WaPo is a defendant because it (and it’s owner) have deep pockets. No other reason. That is the ultimate sin in our civil “justice” system – to have deep pockets. So the deep pocket defendants are scapegoated, while the real wrong-doers go on about their business with nary a care in the world.
I might subscribe to WaPo, when it is run by the yearbook class in a KY high school. I hope WaPo gets the full Gawker treatment by the Kentucky jury.
The state of the law regarding retractions of defamatory statements is a mess and varies greatly from state to state. These various cases are going to bring that to light.
IMHO, weasel-worded retractions should be treated as evidence of actual malice in the original defamation and as further acts of defamation.
The leftist media is perfectly willing to make statements of fact. They will make statements of fact to support a leftist position on little or no evidence. They refuse to make similar statements of fact against leftist positions when there is massive evidence. Saying things like “a more nuanced picture emerged“ leaves open the possibility that the original defamatory statement was correct. Clearly if the evidence showed it to be incorrect the reader would expect the publication to have expressly said so in a retraction.
Good call.
Not only that, but there is no evidence than the picture that “emerged” was more nuanced than the original. A case could be made that a less nuanced picture “emerged.”
I am all for hanging the weasels high, but, as a lawyer would you advise a client to make an honest apology? An honest apology is necessarily an admission of guilt, which I am sure the other side’s lawyers would use against you if they brought suit.
Of course an honest apology, if prompt, might have headed off the present suit. Seven weeks after the fact, this is just a tactic.
I want some!
I don’t believe anyone disputes the benefit of a civil justice system in concept. Anyone who experiences its actual function or lack thereof has to wonder if it does more harm than good. But the harm generally accrues to the less powerful defendants while the good accrues to those who make their living from the system. Lawyers and judges would lose jobs and income if we had a swift and effective system.
But this gets into the issue of the legal effect of an apology/retraction. If a given state will treat a weasel worded retraction with the same effect as a whole hearted retraction, then you’ll get one answer. Otherwise another.
“A Note?” Nah. How about “A Correction, an Abject Apology, and an Announcement of Termination of Employment?” That might be a little wordy; however, any space in the paper so utilized can’t be used to libel anyone else.
Maybe they could make writing a punchier title part of the tryout for the next editor?
Get out your checkbook, Jeffy.
Duplicate post
There is a system available right now that is much more swift and effective than our civil courts. It’s called arbitration. Defendants generally like it; plaintiffs generally don’t. Plaintiffs often prefer to roll the dice on a jury, because every once in a while a runaway jury will award some ridiculous amount of money. It’s basically a big lottery system – where the occasional jackpot winner keeps everyone else buying lottery tickets.
An even more swift and effective system, which is rarely used, is called baseball arbitration. It is essentially a way to force a settlement. In this system each side presents a number that it claims is a fair settlement of the case, and the arbitrator picks one of those numbers. This encourages both sides to be more reasonable in their demands/offers because the more unreasonable a party’s position is, the less likely the arbitrator will choose that number. The current system has the opposite effect – it encourages both parties to be as unreasonable and demanding as possible. Again, plaintiffs don’t like the baseball arbitration system because it deprives them of their chance at the runaway jury lottery.
It’s not an apology, it’s basically a timeline of the failure to fact check a story.
Fact checking might be more complicated for the Washington Post, regardless of how complicated a story might be.
The danger for the plaintiff in this case might be a win will only provide the award of one year complimentary subscription to the Washington Post, losing might mean being awarded a two year complimentary subscription.
This is exactly right. When anybody says the media is the enemy of the people, I don’t see what the big deal is.
Too little, too late. Let’s hope justice is done! Good post, Jim.
The selectively-edited amateur video being given to major news outlets to run with has been around at least since the Rodney King video in 1991, so it’s not as though this is a new phenomenon, other than the transmission speed and the lack of gatekeepers the rise of the Internet and social media has created.
You can’t keep the hyper-partisan progressive sites from trying to stir up stuff via selectively edited videos. But if you’re a major news outlet, you don’t have to immediately jump in there with them just to be among the first wave of the mob, because the goal meshes with your own personal beliefs, which is what the Washington Post did with the Covington kids. And we saw an example last week of the media being more restrained with the video of Diane Feinstein and the kids from the Sunrise Movement arguing over AOC’s Green New Deal.
That also came to light via a selectively edited video released to the media by people trying to paint Feinstein in the worst light possible, and most of the networks ran with the edited video. But you didn’t see the across-the-board knee-jerk condemnation you saw with the Covington situation with Nathan Phillips, because this was liberal-on-left fighting, and it caused the caution light to go on in the heads of a lot of media people.
They didn’t want to demonize Feinstein just based on the limited video alone, and when the fuller video came out, it showed she had been pushed a lot harder to react to the indoctrinated kids than the original video let on. The difference was the same people at the WaPo and elsewhere who cared about not leaping to conclusions on Feinstein’s image didn’t care if they ruined the lives of some MAGA hat-wearing kids from Cincinnati. In their minds, they deserved it.
How long has Mark Steyn been waiting for Mann’s nonsensical suit to be dismissed? Has it been a decade yet?
Almost 7 years if I recall correctly.
NRO/CEI/Simberg request for rehearing by the DC Court of Appeals denied 3/1/2019. Next stop: another year’s delay for petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court.
At this point, Steyn wants the case to go to trial. He did not join in the appeal.
Think of all of the government grants Mann has gotten over the years, too. One wonders if this is how his legal team gets funded. Sick dynamic, but this type of thing is everywhere.
Steyn has wanted it to go to trial for years. That’s why he split with NRO so long ago.
But the judges say no, continue to pay legal fees ad infinitum.
We all come at questions like this from our own experiences, and in that regard I come from more decades than I care to count publicly of almost exclusively representing personal injury clients and families of those who were, we claimed, caused to die by the negligence of the defendant(s), with a relatively few years in the defense bar, defending insurance companies and shipping companies mostly. With that many years of personally experiencing the reality that the only way many, if not most and close to all, people involved in the cases our firm handled was by way of the contingency fee contract, I could never agree to anything even resembling loser pay arrangements, as that would close the door to most citizens to any kind of equitable redress. In fact, I took quite a bit of ribbing from my defense bar colleagues because I believed this so passionately and also, no doubt, they knew that my law partner (and wife) and I leaned right, which made us a rarity in the plaintiff bar. We used the old commercial for the Maytag repairman to describe our “plight” — we would say that we were like the Maytag repairman of the plaintiff bar– lonesomest guy in town! To say that we were out of step politically would be the understatement of the year!
All of that said, however, it is also quite easy for me to understand those in the corporate world feeling like the abuses of the system far over balance the interests of those like my clients for whom “loser pays” and/or the removal of the contingency fee arrangement would mean, quite simply, and not being dramatic about it all, they would just have to lick their wounds, so to speak, and not receive any compensation for wrongful acts of others. I also should note a few other matters which might be helpful in considering my opinions– (1) I have been out of the active practice for quite a while now, and I am painfully aware it has changed dramatically since we were practicing and (2) our practice was — especially by today’s standards–always small, even when we had a larger firm, and we did not handle any class actions or mass tort matters, which are the source of many of the abuses of the system these days and (3) we never, never, ever advertised. Period.
Sincerely, Jim
As to #2 and #3, we are of almost identical minds!
as to #1, unlike the Washington Post, and other “news” outlets in the journalism “profession” who are all very likely to pay big time (bigly?) for this wretched act of malpractice, I hereby and unconditionally apologize to all beachfront properties in Montana, with the sole qualification that I perhaps slipped up and said that because, to this child of the Deep South, the idea of sunning oneself near, and even putting a toe in, the waters abutting a beach in Montana almost causes physical pain! :-)
Sincerely, Jim