![]() ![]() (One ongoing case from a Russian oligarch is demanding that our DC bureau chief, David Corn, turn over documents about Trump and Russia.) Some have complained about accurate reporting. Some have tried to force our journalists to turn over their notebooks. Instead, there has been a string of smaller ones. There has been no giant lawsuit against us since VanderSloot. (We paid so they could both have representation.) They tried to drag in the Obama campaign and rifle through their emails, claiming they had somehow been involved in the story (they weren’t). His lawyers deposed the local newspaper reporter whose stories we had quoted. The legal strategy in the VanderSloot case had been designed at every turn to eat up time, money, and mental bandwidth. Some are just about inflicting as much pain as possible.” Not “don’t publish hard-hitting articles because you don’t want to get sued.” But “lawsuits aren’t necessarily about winning. The judge deciding the case found that our article and my tweet were truthful and protected free speech. In the end, Mother Jones prevailed on every count without the case even going to trial. ( I hope you will again today as we try to raise the, gulp, $105,000 we need to finish our short fall fundraising push on track by Friday’s deadline.) But we were able to keep fighting because we knew readers would have our back-and you did, ultimately donating more than $300,000 to help with the bills. The case ate up the reserve fund that we had built for a rainy day (something we really felt when the pandemic hit) and then some. It was the first we heard about a case that would drag on for nearly three years and cost nearly $3 million, of which more than $600,000 came out of Mother Jones’ pocket. In January 2013, we got a call from a local reporter in Idaho, asking for comment about VanderSloot suing MoJo (as well as the reporter, Stephanie Mencimer, and me personally, for a tweet I posted about the story). It was pretty much how it went when Republican billionaire Frank VanderSloot, a former finance co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, came after us about an article we’d published about political giving and his anti-LGBT rights activism in 2012. That seemed weird, as did the fact that we hadn’t actually been served with any lawsuit.īut then again, the weirdness was familiar. Huh? Neither Clara nor I had heard from anyone asking for a change or correction to the tweets. The complaint claimed that each of the defendants had been “individually offered the opportunity to correct, delete, and/or apologize for their false statements, but each refused.” If you can force news organizations-especially independent ones-to constantly run up legal bills for comparatively trivial reasons, you can do a lot of damage. It named Clara and 11 other people who had tweeted about the incident: Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, CNN commentator Ana Navarro, Sen. And that was the end of it, as far as we knew.Įxcept that eight months later, a local newspaper reported that a defamation suit had been filed in Kentucky on behalf of several of the students’ families. Clara watched the videos (the longest of which is here) and tweeted about what she saw and the media coverage of the event. They captured a confrontation between MAGA-hat-wearing high school students and Native American elder Nathan Phillips. But I also want to tell you about a big reason why, even in the face of scary things, Mother Jones doesn’t have to run and hide.īack in January 2019, my colleague Clara Jeffery, MoJo’s editor-in-chief, saw videos online of a pro-Trump rally in Washington, DC. There are things that scare me, and I want to tell you about one of them (it’s the season for confronting our fears, after all). If you’ve been following Mother Jones for a little while, you may have seen our tagline “Smart, Fearless journalism.” I like that line, but when I’m being completely honest, the “fearless” part is kind of impossible, at least for me. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |