Back in October of 2003, uber-blogger Atrios was threatened with a libel suit by Donald Luskin. My response then was:
God knows, I’m not a fan of Atrios, who I think is part of the Jackie Goldberg/ suicidal-lemming wing of the Democratic Party.
But this is just embarrassing.
Well, we’re not done with blogger libel lawsuits, I guess. Wizbang points out that liberal blogger David Niewert, of Orcinius, is saber rattling re Wizbang’s harsh treatment of Professor Hailey’s incoherent and oft-changing claim that the Rathergate documents were in fact done on a typewriter.I went over and read Niewert’s posts, and then the background posts by Paul on Wizbang (one was redacted for tone, which I’ve done as well) as well as a quick scan of the Professor’s work to see what I thought.
In reverse order:
The professor’s work is barely coherent, and I’m having a hard time – given an unwillingness to approach it like one of Joyce’s works – making any sense of his claims, except for two, that based on scaled up fuzzy images, he’s claiming that the font isn’t Times Roman and that the letter patterns show signs of irregularity consistent with a typewriter. The stated claims go far further, but I can’t get from his data to his claim, so let’s just put it aside for the moment and suggest that an expository rhetoric tuneup might be in order. I certainly didn’t see anything that shook my belief that the documents were electronically generated (and I won’t go into why right now).
Wizbang’s posts, given the inferred tone from the apology were pretty snarky, and I do wonder why Paul would call the guy’s boss (the head of Hailey’s) about this.
To me there’s a clear line between arguing against someone’s points and rattling their personal cage. When you call someone’s boss, wife, etc. and finger-wag that they’ve done something naughty on the Internet, you’re moving the discussion from – a discussion – to something with significant impact on someone’s personal life, and that seem to be a different level of the game.
Interestingly enough, Niewert’s claims about Paul and Wizbang aren’t about this call, but about a broader theory of defamation and libel.
They’ve continued in the same vein with the Hailey report — openly libeling their subject and accusing him of unethical and potentially criminal behavior, all without the benefit of getting a response from him as well as any consideration of the gravity of the charges. Even their most recent posts continue to assert the “academic fraud” charge.
and approvingly notes that
[Commenter] David needn’t worry, actually. Because the folks at Wizbang are about to discover that there are consequences for leveling these charges.
While it’s true that, as the Deseret News reported, Hailey himself is not considering legal action against the authors of the Wizbang posts that have openly libeled him, the same cannot be said of the officials at Utah State University.
Hailey, in fact, assured me that the university’s attorneys consider the Wizbang posts “fully actionable” and are in the process of preparing legal remedy for the defamation of character that the blog has leveled both against Hailey and the university. It’s difficult to say at this point whether they will act on it, but there’s at least some likelihood they will.
…and…
So here’s what is probably about to happen: USU’s attorneys will send legal letters to the Wizbang authors demanding a full retraction (and, if justice is served, a full apology to both Hailey and the university), upon pain of facing a civil action for libel. If the authors refuse, then they’ll be served with more papers detailing the civil lawsuit filed against them.
It’s ugly, but it’s a hard, cold fact of the real world of journalism.
In any event, the Wizbang authors may soon find themselves wishing they had applied a little old-fashioned journalistic prudence before rushing to print with their manifestly reckless accusations.
But in the process, they may provide a useful object lesson for us all.
I’ll call bullshit here.
Blogging isn’t a community anymore, so appealing to ‘community standards’ probably isn’t fruitful. But I’ll go to my post defending Atrios’ right to speak without a lawyer on staff:
And pundits who use slings ought to be able to take a stone or two, and the fact that Mr Luskin can’t – the fact assuming that the letter Atrios posted was genuine (and the lawyer’s name does check out on the firm website) – certainly drops him a few kilometers below credible in my view.
Free speech – even hurtful speech – is something the folks at NRO (and others) have championed for some time. It appears that they neglected to mention that it only matters when someone else’s ox is being gored.
Similarly, Niewert and his commenters seem to believe that it’s right to hide behind lawyer’s skirts when challenged in the marketplace of ideas. I’m positive that they wouldn’t feel the same way if the shoe was on the other foot; he says so in his essay on “The Personal and The Political” (it’s one I’ve bookmarked for my long-delayed ‘taking back the Democratic Party’ piece). He’s become a partisan warrior who believes that the challenge of the Newt Gingriches is best met with Democratic Newt Gingriches.
Great. Just great.
I don’t see what Whizbang did as wrong. They discovered evidence of fraud – a paper claiming to show that you could reproduce the CBS memos using a typewriter, when the author of said paper was dumb enough to leave all the evidence of his photoshopping up in the directory for his webserver. Not a case of difference of opinion, a case of an author claiming to have “proved” something by faking his proof. Bellesilles anyone?
This paper was being forwarded by Mary Mapes to others as a defense for her use of the forged memos. Whizbang contacts the university, and posts on the incident. The author re-edits his paper to add commentary stating that he didn’t actually type the memos up in a typewriter, that he cut and pasted characters within Photoshop in order to prove you can duplicate the memos with a typewriter. Which makes zero sense. Once the author had to ‘fess up about how he constructed his ‘typewriter’ memos, the paper becomes non-sensical.
Better the author be exposed for a fraud now, before he has the chance to do any real damage, or embarrass any more gullible news organizations.
The only thing I’d question about what Wizbang did was in contacting the guy’s department head. If my post wasn’t clear on that, let me know – I’ll do some editing.
Otherwise, good work on their part.
A.L.
I’d say that if a guy is faking his proof on a national controversy, with the university’s name clearly on the work (it was), and this can be proved – then yeah, contacting his department head is appropriate.
Hailey’s offense wasn’t just personal, it was professional. Just as Rather’s was professional.
Bloggers don’t need to get a response for that – they put forward their proofs, and an argument ensues, and in this case the proof was pretty clear.
When you step into the public realm as a political player, be prepared to play. What Orcinus really wants is a standard that would have suppressed blogosphere discussion of the CBS memos – which his proposed standard would have done. Sorry, buddy, it doesn’t work that way.
As for the University, if they’re really dumb enough to sue Wizbang, they’re going to get a lot more than they bargained for.
I would have questioned that too, except the paper is hosted on the University’s webserver, and it wasn’t clear if the University had requested the work, was aware of it, or was not at all. Turns out the University was aware of the work, but had not specifically requested it. Had the work been on his own weblog, or a non-edu server, I would agree that contacting his department head was out of line.
To me it’s similar to how certain folks hold WoC collectively responsible for the comments or statements of other authors on the site. The university has an interest in the content that they serve, and so it is appropriate to contact them when you find really bad content.
I’m with Celeste on that one. Once you use a University URL and put your department logo on an online work, it isn’t just personal any more.
A question… A.L., can you explain what you mean by that last line re: Gingrich? I don’t recall him engaging in this sort of SLAPP behaviour himself, but then I don’t pay that close attention to your political minutia down there. Was there something I missed?
Sounds like that famous legal manuever “write them a scary letter and hope they give up”.
When I saw the Wizbang post and followed the link to the “usu.edu” url, and saw all these .gif files with different info in them, like dates and whatnot, I immediately assumed the university was somehow involved with the project; I think most reasonable people would conclude the same. You’d think they’d be embarrassed by it, instead of threatening to sue somebody who points out how ridiculous they all look.
It’s wasn’t specifically targeted at SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation); it was aimed at the ‘take no prisoners’ model that I do believe Gingrich brought into national prominence.
A.L.
“He’s become a partisan warrior who believes that the challenge of the Newt Gingriches is best met with Democratic Newt Gingriches.”
Niewert has become the very worst example of what he hates…a shrill ideologue. His Fascist meme has done as much or more than anything to pollute the public discourse in this election.
YetAnotherRick, let’s keep some proportion here.
There are way more serious things polluting the public discourse in this election than Niewart’s misplaced (and deluded, if he thinks this is going anywhere) Schadenfreude.
A.L., thanks for the clarifier.
“…it was aimed at the ‘take no prisoners’ model that I do believe Gingrich brought into national prominence.”
Gleefully highlighted into national prominence by a media that was all to willing to ignore the ‘crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!’ model perfected by a former representative of mine, Jim Wright (D- TX).
Be that as it may, Jim Newart once again shows that in his world free speech is his right to say whatever he feels is necessary to shout-down (suppress) those he disagrees with.
What Newart is really trying to do is change the subject from Hailey’s very real failure to breath life into the fake memo corpse toward Wizbang’s theoretical “libel.” An all too typical tactic of his.
Neiwert is one of my favorite bloggers, but he spends way too much time on relatively minor controversies and incidents like this when he should be concentrating on the big central ideas of “The Personal and the Political” and “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism.”
A better topic for him occured to me today after reading some comments here: “Jacksonianism” and “nationalist populism” as embryos for fascism.
Celeste, the paper never actually said it was done on a typewriter. The original vaguely hinted (near the end of the paper) that some of the examples could have been done on a computer.
It wasn’t clear at all, and the obvious assumption was that the examples were typewritten – since the purpose of testing a digital font that may or may not have been available on a typewriter at the time is … rather unclear – but it wasn’t a certain case of fraud. It could simply be terrible oversight, extremely bad writing or very fuzzy thinking. The professor later did add a clear statement, of course, and is still changing the document, including a note that it is a “draft” document to cover himself.
It does make the point though, that if bloggers start getting noticed, they have to think twice about the words they use.
Oh, and just to clarify that first sentence in my comment, the professor didn’t actually say *his examples* were done on a typewriter. That was where the fraud claim came up. He *DID* claim that the CBS memos were done on a typewriter, though without an actual demonstration with an actual typewriter I don’t see the point of an opinion, expert or otherwise.
VR –
And if you re-read my comment, you’ll see that I didn’t say he claimed to type them on a typewriter either. I said he claimed to show that they could be reproduced on a typewriter. Then he proceeded to create a sucky match to parts of the CBS documents using a lot of photoshopping in order to force it to fit.
I think it is too generous to say it could have just been oversight or fuzzy thinking. The paper was weasle-worded in a way to try to obscure the fact that it was proving nothing. Had the professor started out with a statement of “I can prove the CBS memos weren’t computer generated by taking a mixed group of computer font characters and piecing them together in photoshop, which results in a sort-of match” from the start, everyone else in the room would have said “That’s proof? Pass the bong, man. You’ve definitely had enough.”
What would be the point of writing a paper proving that you can create the memoes in PhotoShop using a modern TrueType face? I don’t think “terrible oversight, extremely bad writing or very fuzzy thinking” can account for it, honestly.
If he *wasn’t* trying to claim they could have been created on a typewriter, then what might he have thought he was doing?
Wired reports the story.