What I’m Reading, December 9, 2014

Posted on December 9, 2014 by wellsdc

The Second Coming of Walter Winchell, Jim Wright, Stonekettle Station, December 4, 2014

Abdul Rahman al Harbi’s life was destroyed by Glenn Beck.

He was wounded when the bombs went off, but the injuries inflicted on his life by the murderous Tsarnaev brothers are nothing compared to the damage done by Glenn Beck’s lunatic greed.

Al Harbi filed suit against Glenn Beck, The Blaze, Mercury Radio Arts and Premiere Radio Networks for defamation and slander.

Instead of owning up to his mistake, Beck attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed.

True to form, the man who touts “personal responsibility,” who pilloried media personalities for waging a campaign of defamation against Iva Toguri, that man argued even though every word he’d ever said about Al Harbi was a proven falsehood before he said it, Al Harbi was a “public figure” and therefore Beck should be able to say whatever he liked without consequence. Never mind the fact that Beck himself was the one personally responsible for making Al Harbi a public figure in the first place.

The judge didn’t buy it.

Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris ruled the suit brought by Abdul Rahman al Harbi could go forward.

[Emphasis in original.]

Not the Ducks! -Push Back Against Doctors, Avicenna, A Million Gods, December 7, 2014 Continue reading →

Something for Shark Week Producers to Consider

Posted on August 16, 2014 by wellsdc

If you have to lie to scientists to get them to be in your faux-documentaries, you’re doing documentary filmmaking wrong.

Besides that, it might be easier—and not significantly more expensive—just to hire actors to pretend to be scientists. Plus, you’ll avoid any potentially pesky fraud or defamation claims.

What I’m Reading, June 10, 2014

Posted on June 10, 2014 by wellsdc

The Art of the Hissy Fit, Digby, AlterNet, October 24, 2007

Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.

There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.

Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris Are Old News: A Totally Different Atheism Is on the Rise, Chris Hall, AlterNet, June 4, 2014

Continue reading →

A Very Bad Defamation Claim

Posted on May 15, 2014 by wellsdc

William Morris Design of the Letter F converted from a font "Goudy Initialen" by Dieter Steffmann, uploaded by kuba [Public domain, CC0 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)], via Openclipart I read about a lot of defamation claims, both threatened and actually filed as lawsuits, and most of them seem pretty bad. As a broad overview, in order to successfully sue for defamation, you have to prove that someone (1) published information about you (2) that is untrue, (3) that the person knew or should have known that it was not true, and (4) that this harmed you in a tangible (i.e. expressible in a dollar amount) way. This is not the precise definition of defamation in all U.S. jurisdictions, but it’s a start. The idea is to balance people’s rights of free speech with people’s rights against conduct that directly causes them harm.

Peter LaBarbera, a gentleman who apparently gets offended about gay people for a living, had an unpleasant experience on a college campus not too long ago. He was giving a speech to a rather large crowd on a campus in Ohio, when most of the crowd abruptly stood up and walked out in protest. It turns out that the protest was planned in advance, and quite frankly, it strikes me as a reasonably effective method of protest—certainly better than yelling or heckling.

According to some observers, or at least some writers who wrote about the event, LaBarbera allegedly said something to the effect of “You’re leaving? Are you effing kidding?” as people filed out of the room.

That’s the part he thinks is defamatory. That someone accused him of using the word “effing.” Last time I checked, “effing” is what you say to avoid saying a swear word. Continue reading →

A Quick Refresher on Defamation Law

Posted on January 27, 2014 by wellsdc

A Hypocrite and Slanderer by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons Statements of opinion are protected by the First Amendment, and therefore are not actionable as defamation, e.g. “In my opinion, he has molested and tortured data…” or “I think he has molested and tortured data.” Your choice of words might make you sound like an ass, but you have the right to sound like an ass.

Untrue statements presented as fact are not protected by the First Amendment, and therefore may be subject to a defamation claim, e.g. “He has molested and tortured data…” It becomes a question of fact for a jury as to whether the statement is false, and whether the person made the statement with actual malice as to its falsity:

A judge for the D.C. Superior Court on Thursday refused to let libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and conservative news site National Review off the hook from a defamation lawsuit brought by climatologist Michael Mann, saying the sites’ musings about the accuracy of Mann’s research may not be protected by the First Amendment.

Mann had sued the outlets in 2012, claiming they published defamatory articles accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Specifically, Mann alleged that CEI published — and then National Review republished — an article calling Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”

Judge Frederick H. Weisberg on Thursday ruled that while “opinions and rhetorical hyperbole” are protected speech under the First Amendment, accusing a climate scientist of lying about his seemingly factual data is serious enough to warrant defamation claims.

“The allegedly defamatory aspect of this sentence is the statement that plaintiff ‘molested and tortured data,’ not the rhetorically hyperbolic comparison to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky,” Judge Weisberg wrote.

In my opinion, the statements at issue in this lawsuit constitute defamation.

Photo credit: A Hypocrite and Slanderer by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.

All Your Nudes Are Belong to Us: Likeness Rights in the Age of Photoshop

Posted on May 28, 2013 by wellsdc

During an inadvertent foray onto TMZ’s website, I came across this bit of fun a few months ago:

DO NOT Photoshop Megan Fox’s naked face on another chick’s naked body … and then publish it online … because she will sue the crap out of you — at least that’s the threat she sent to one website this week.

Megan’s legal team fired off the cease and desist letter to a parody website called Celebrity Jihad — after the site published a shockingly good Photoshopped pic last week, depicting Megan’s face on a naked chick’s body.

I’d be curious to hear a fair use argument for the doctored photo, but copyright law does not seem to enter into the discussion here. It’s hard to know what legal arguments were raised, because all the coverage comes from mouth-breathing websites like TMZ and Perez Hilton. Anyway, the website that posted the pictures was not nearly terribly clever in its reply:

A rep for Celebrity Jihad tells TMZ … “While we appreciate Megan Fox’s concern for her image, we find it hard to believe that a woman who spent two Transformers movies bent over with her breasts pressed together could have her reputation damaged by a blatantly satirical website.”

See, Megan Fox slutted it up in two Michael Bay movies, so how could she complain about some hack website sticking her face on someone else’s naked body, amirite??? (That’s my interpretation of their argument, anyway.)

(If you want to see the picture, you’ll have to Google it yourself. I already feel bad enough for linking to TMZ, although I tagged it “nofollow.”) Continue reading →

Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Lean Finely-Textured Beef

Posted on September 17, 2012 by wellsdc

Beef Products, Inc. (or “BPI”) is mad. You may have never heard of BPI, but you have probably heard of their product, lean finely-textured beef (“LFTB”). Of late, LFTB has gained some prominence in the public eye under the slightly more-descriptive name “pink slime.”

BPI is not happy that people in the media are calling their product “pink slime,” and they believe that it is hurting their business. They are therefore doing what we in this country always do: suing.

[BPI] has just filed a defamation (“veggie libel”) lawsuit for $1.2 billion (!) against an amazing cast of characters:

ABC News (owned by Disney)

TV news anchor Diane Sawyer

ABC correspondent Jim Avila

ABC correspondent David Kerley

Gerald Zirnstein , former USDA employee who invented the term “pink slime”

Carl Custer, former USDA employee

Kit Foshee, whistleblower former BPI employee

From what I understand, the concern is not just that the concept of “pink slime” is kind of gross. People have raised health concerns as well, due to questions of ammonia content or something. BPI disputes that the process that involves ammonia poses any danger to consumers.

I get that we cannot expect, as end users in a vast, complex society, to receive our consumer goods in anything much resembling their natural state. We’ve probably all been to Subway or Blimpie and seen the giant cylindrical loaves of turkey (just like the Pilgrims ate!) Continue reading →

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