Unless it’s Stephen King, that’s the kamikaze defense. “Go ahead and sue, you won’t even recover enough for lawyers’ fees”. Whereas 19th Century Fox has plenty of money. The only thing more career limiting than doing something that could cost your company millions, is if you do and your company can actually pay those millions.
But the two most important things car - “can we sue?” and “if we sue, what will the publicity look like?”
OTOH, sometimes it helps to make a point that some stuff will not go unanswered. (“libel chill”).
The story about this was that it apparently made other critics think twice, since their life would be tied in knots for years if they went too far criticizing McD.
The McLibel case took place when the law of defamation in the UK was wildly biased against the defendants. It finally got revised in 2013. Neither EU nor American law would have allowed it.
That’s what I remembered, too, but Wikipedia indicates that Dan Quayle was who Trudeau depicted with a feather.
He apparently used one of the “thousand points of light” to depict George H.W. Bush (so I did get that one wrong); George W. Bush was shown as an asterisk (signifying the contested 2000 election), originally wearing a cowboy hat, then wearing a Roman military helmet (as in the image I shared above) after the start of the Gulf War.
I’d like to point out ( I don’t I did yet) that Family Guy depicted OJ Simpson as a murderer and Bill Clinton as a womanizer. While OJ was found not guilty of killing Nicole and Ron, the average person thinks he did it. So, it would be very difficult to prove damage to his reputation. Bill’s affair with Monica is excedingly well documented. So, he would have the same problem.
Some people are referred to as “libel proof,” meaning their reputation is so bad, that no matter what somebody says, it’s not going to changes the person’s public perception. For example, no horrible lie about Donald Trump could make his supporters hate him, or his detractors think less of him than they already do.
One somewhat forgotten fictional portrayal of real life people is the Trey Parker and Matt Stone comedy That’s my Bush! which aired a few episodes at the beginning of GWB’s presidential term. It had George, Laura, and some other characters based on real people, as well as sitcom tropes like a wacky neighbor and a wise house keeper.
It was more a satire of sitcoms than political satire.
Plus there’s the matter in the case of US media of the higher threshold here for “public figures” to try and claim protection from disparaging depictions.
This is a pretty extreme and uncalled-for political swipe, in a thread that isn’t particularly political. I’m going to have to give you an official Warning for this one.
There’s the story about Robert Service. He worked in a bank in the Yukon during the gold rush. He wrote a number of poems about the life there, the most famous being The Cremation of Sam McGee. Apparently he used names of real bank clients and the story goes that Sam McGee had to leave town because he got tired of being asked if he was warm yet.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee
This is a good point that, even outside of the possibility of being sued, the media-conglomerate-mega-corporation likely has a relationship with the consumer-goods-mega corporation that goes well beyond the specific movie or show in question. This will impact their behavior regardless of their legal rights.
On the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia podcast, the creators revealed that FX had made a deal with Budweiser to have their branding in the bar during the first season. After the first episode aired, FX got a phone call saying, “take us out of it.” Even though the whole season had already been shot and Budweiser didn’t really have a leg to stand on, FX still digitally replaced all the Budweiser signage with generic “Beer” signs. Because they had a much bigger relationship with Budweiser as an advertiser than one dinky show.