For one thing, the statements made by media in Jewell’s case were not truthful. NBC News, for example, claimed the FBI had enough evidence to arrest Jewell.
But it only costs a quarter!
Aww, I like the NY Post, it’s probably the best guilty pleasure tabloid out there. Sure they messed up a few times, but they were in good company last week.
A QUARTER?!..I mean, A QUARTER?!
This is another good point. A lot of the objections seem to issue from the notion of “While I and my friends can handle this kind of information, with all the necessary caveats, the general American public will be too irresponsible with it!”
I don’t think this was born out, and I also don’t think that journalists should limit themselves to passing along information sourced through official channels only (my guess is that a number of cops love the Post and passed along unofficial information. That’s why the Post’s reporting was the inside scoop and generally true (the death count was off)).
For example, the press started inquiring as to Scooter Libby’s involvement in the Plame Affair in October 2003. Official channels denied this. It wasn’t until two years later that the burgeoning scandal forced the government’s hand. Should the press have kept quiet about this? Merely report that “the investigation remains ongoing; it would be premature to identify persons of interest at this time.”?
Overall, a vigilant press is our best mechanism for government oversight (maybe second-best, there the function of free, regular elections), so I’d rather permit work-in-progress reporting on government investigations rather than letting the government decide when stories are ready for publication (or encouraging a journalistic ethos that would amount to the same thing).
If, in this case, the Post is willing to carry this suit to the end rather than settling, the two won’t get paid. That’s assuming that you are correct. If I were the two with the lawyer, I’d certainly like my chances of getting some money from the Post, either through a settlement or decision.
It’s true that the Post may dislike it’s chances of bad publicity and choose to settle. But since they are covered legally, we’re certainly not likely to be talking about settlement figures that are huge…certainly not anything that would require “a nice big warchest” because they’re going to “get cleaned out.”
The false New York Post headline read, “Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon”. Now I’ll admit they spelled, “Boston” correctly. But note that the FBI released a total of two photographs to the press, that of the suspects Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlon Tsarnaev.
As for the first sentence of the story, investigators were emailing themselves literally hundreds of photographs: that’s what an investigation is about. It seems to me the only reason to select this pair out was the color of their skin, even though the color of their duffel backs didn’t match the description released by the FBI.
Physical evidence it seems was trumped by an appeal to bigotry. I have a problem with that.
Here is what the Post story said:
In addition to spelling “Boston” correctly, the Post also truthfully reported that the photo they published was being circulated among the law enforcement community, and this was being done to identify the men pictured therein. Agree?
One of them had a bag. And I understand the pun.
I’ve explained my view of the facts here and I don’t see what you’ve to rebut it beyond saying “they had bags,” which is literally only half true. I don’t see any explanation for prioritizing this image or using a headline that implied these men were the bombers, and I’m not persuaded the Post made any serious effort to find out if these were probably the bombers. That can come out at trial but I don’t see how they could have had enough to go on since the FBI was already looking at video of two other men - the men who turned out to be the real bombers.
Why is whatever explanation you see, or don’t see, relevant to the question of whether the Post legally defamed the two men pictured?
Spare me the pedantry, please. For the men to sue successfully, they would have to show the Post was wrong, that the report harmed them, and that the Post didn’t make enough of an effort to back up what it reported. I think the Post erred in implying they were the bombers or primary suspects; I don’t think I have to explain how it harmed them; and based on what we know I have a great deal of trouble imagining the Post had a solid basis to believe these two men were more likely to be the bombers than anyone else. There’s nothing in that gigantic image that explains these were two people among many that the FBI was looking for, and the article itself shows that the FBI had already identified the real bombers (it just hadn’t made that fact public at the time).
That’s not at all what the Post has to show. They simply have to show that what they said was truthful.
And my contention is that it is exactly what they need to show, since that’s what they implied by putting them on the cover as “Bag Men” without any reference to the other people the FBI was looking for.
Unfortunately, that’s not the standard. They don’t have to report on any other people the FBI is looking for. That’s a judgement call as to what’s newsworthy; that’s not a falsehood to omit.
The falsehood was suggesting that Barhoun and Zaimi were the bombers. The Post’s failure to splash a picture of anyone else on the cover illustrates what they did wrong. If they’d used half a dozen pictures they at least would have demonstrated that the FBI was looking to talk to a bunch of people and they couldn’t all be guilty. Instead it named two guys “Bag Men” because they had the best available picture.
And yet you yourself used the Post’s reporting on the Saudi kid who had nothing to do with anything as a cite for the bombing being perpetrated by Al Qaeda-linked jihadists. Yes, Tamerlan may yet be shown to have some (likely tenuous) link to Al Qaeda via Chechen nationalist groups, but the Post’s story about the Saudi implied a completely different sort of link and was taken by you yourself to be indicative of the kid being a suspect rather than merely a bystander. And when law enforcement repeated emphatically that he was not a suspect, the Post stood by their story.
I believe that you and Bricker are probably right that the Post can parse their stories in such a way as to be sheltered from successful litigation, but calling them “generally true” is just flat wrong. They were intentionally misleading, and sufficiently so that you yourself were misled by them.
Are you contending this conduct amounts to actionable defamation?
Or are you simply suggesting it’s something less than completely accurate?
I think so. The Post’s defense of the cover is entirely technical and I don’t think it’s enough to shield them from the fact that they pointed the finger at two innocent people. Maybe it turns out they had a really solid reason to think these guys were more likely to be the killers than anybody else who got the once-over from Reddit without having their picture plastered on the cover of the Post. But I doubt that’s the case. Truth is the ultimate defense against libel, but I don’t think that extends to this instance- where the paper ran some half-truths with very misleading implications and (from what I can tell) didn’t do enough to back it up.
And are you relying on some caselaw to reach this conclusion? When you say their defense is “technical,” and “it’s not enough” what kinds of authority can you adduce to show instances where “technical” defenses to defamation are defeated by these kinds of implications?