All The News That’s Fit To Sue
It would be pretty funny, I mean tragic, if this $27 million defamation suit by DC lobbyist Vicki L. Iseman, over the NY’s famously gutless insinuations of an affair with John McCain the newspaper didn’t have the facts to actually report …
were to end up being the straw that broke that media donkey’s shaky back. As the article notes, even the Times public editor thought it was a low blow, which is saying something. At a minimum it should make a heck of a trial. If the New York Times as we know it still exists by then. Long Island Business News:
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Richmond on Tuesday, alleges the article falsely communicated that Iseman and McCain had an illicit “romantic” relationship in 1999 when he was chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and she was a lobbyist representing clients before Congress.
…
The 36-page complaint charges that the story implies an “unprofessional relationship” between Iseman and McCain.
Both Iseman and McCain denied any improper relationship. However, the public viewed the story as being about an affair, according to the suit, which cites the post-publication remarks of 10 different commentators across the political spectrum. In each case, their comments about the story assumed it was about an alleged affair, the lawyers noted.
The Times’ own public editor, Clark Hoyt, published what Allen called a “blistering attack” on the Times’ decision to publish the original Iseman article.
…
The piece was published at the height of the primary season last winter, and, the suit states, the defendants knew that it would “reverberate around the world.”
Particularly gutless when you consider that this is the newspaper that recently allowed Bill Ayers to obfuscate and revise his own past but declined to entertain a rebuttal, on top of the reluctance on the part of media organizations in general during the campaign to examine what was known about Obama and his associations. That and the race-baiting. If and when the end comes for the New York Times as we know it, it will be a mercy killing.
I remember discussing this Iseman story with some colleagues at the time, all of us having some familiarity with libel laws and lawsuits, and speculating among ourselves, these people either know a lot more than they are letting on, or they are out of their minds. Given that a lot of people are looking at being deposed under oath, and a discovery process is about to take place, it looks like someone, on one side or the other, is out of someone’s mind. Either that or Iseman just figures they and their insurers will pay her a lot of money to drop the matter.
Topics: media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:20 pm Comments (1) on Tuesday, December 30, 2008
One Response to “All The News That’s Fit To Sue”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:02 am
Am I misremembering or didn’t the Times also turn down an op-ed submitted by McCain (in semi-response, I thought, to an op-ed already published from Obama) on some flimsy pretext or other that McCain’s piece didn’t address the issues the NYT thought ought to be addressed?