Libel Suits Against Bloggers

Lawsuits against blogs on the rise....

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20061003/1a_cover03.art.htm

 

This is good. All these folks who believe their Internet rants are more truthful than mainstream media will learn that caution comes with accountability. Eventually, who knows? Maybe they'll see that it isn't so cheap and easy to be a media mogul when you need to hire editors and lawyers on retainer to save yourself from yourself the way we do.

 

In a couple of those instances, wow, those bloggers were stupid. Dumb, in fact.
It appears they don't know the definition of libel.

The tag on www.technorati.com is funny: '55 million blogs, some of them have to be good.'
Soon, they will probably add: '55 million blogs, at least 1 million will be accused of libel by summer of 2007.'

 

Beautiful. Now the turds have to actually exercise some responsbility, instead of acting like spoiled brats who think they're above any law.

I especially love this line in the story about the guy in the opening part who was sued by his lawyer -- and lost.

"Milum lost in court because he could not meet the basic defense for libel claims: He could not prove that his allegations that Banks was involved in bribery and corruption were true."

Oh my God, bloggers everywhere are telling themselves in horror: we have to tell the truth.

 

There's no question that there are way too many people out there with blogs who just throw shit against the wall and hope it sticks.

Here we have a guy who is anonymous (not a surprise) who criticizes the city government as well as our paper. He's posted a lot of inaccurate information from alleged e-mailers (who are also anonymous). A few weeks ago he posted an alleged e-mail from someone saying our mayor was busted for drunk driving in a nearby town (to be fair, the mayor was once caught sleeping off a night on the town in the Burger King parking lot one night, so the story could have been true). Turns out the supposed arrest didn't happen, but the blogger never took the thing off his site, nor did he apologize.

 

The message board for the school I cover suddenly became registration-only last week when some people had posted some lurid alleged details of an athletes' personal life. Shit was potentially slanderous as hell, and I know for a fact that the coach involved was planning something when I talked to him (he told me this unsolicited), apparently the threat worked for him. I doubt he threaten a suit or anything, but a suit could have been filed, it was nasty stuff.

 

Amazes me that college fans -- as quick as they are to flick off rivals and whatnot -- are even quicker to turn on their own. Nasty is right.

 

There's a guy over here who sends out an e-mail with political news, links from papers around the state and commentary. He's also a paid political consultant....and it don't take long to realize who he's working for. The stuff is very slanted -- putting editorial comments at the bottom of articles, not running stories that make his guys look bad, making a big deal because his candidate got endorsed by some weeklies out in the sticks and ignoring that his opponent got endorsed by the major metros. The whole deal rankles me. Of course, the local daily runs a story that points out what he's doing and it's "The big media is picking on me. They're scared of what I do. They're threatened by me."