It’s flattering when the executive editor of the News & Observer calls to ask if he could meet me to discuss a column I’d written. But when John Drescher came to my office, he wanted to share much more than pleasantries. He was upset that my November media column, “Connecting the wrong dots,” had taken the newspaper to task for what I called sloppy reporting in a 2010 series critical of the State Bureau of Investigation’s evidence-gathering procedures.
The reporting in one installment from the series resulted in a libel lawsuit against the N&O by former SBI special investigator Beth Desmond, whose attorney convinced a jury that the paper’s coverage defamed Desmond. She claims to have developed post-traumatic stress syndrome after the series ran. As a result, she was reassigned within the agency. She “no longer performs firearms analysis and now oversees background checks,” the paper stated.
The jury awarded a total of $7.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages — an amount that exceeds the statutory limit for damages in such cases. Even if the newspaper loses its appeal of the verdict, it won’t have to pay the full amount.
But that wasn’t the reason for Drescher’s visit. He took issue with some of the statements I made about testimony from the trial, but they were taken from his own newspaper’s reporting on the case. See his letter to me here.
Drescher, along with the rest of the newspaper’s management, say the jury came to the wrong conclusion based on the judge’s interpretation of the law. One of the attorneys representing the N&O, John Bussian, argued that the judge prevented the paper from defending itself by limiting the amount of relevant evidence and testimony the jury could consider, making the burden of proof far too easy to meet when this case is compared with the standards in place for libel lawsuits.
Bussian — along with the N&O’s brass and other media analysts — worry that if the verdict stands, it could set a precedent that makes it much easier for parties who are upset with their treatment in the media to sue and win even when the embarrassing stories are completely truthful.
(Full disclosure: Bussian has provided and continues to provide legal advice for the John Locke Foundation, Carolina Journal’s publisher.)
I agree. It’s a troubling outcome, particularly with an environment in which the president-elect has been eager to use lawsuits to harass critics and has made it clear he’ll treat “unfriendly” media — not only opinion writers who disagree with him but also watchdog journalists who want to make sure the administration is obeying the law — with contempt.
And Drescher credits Desmond’s attorney for using a populist, “stick it to the man” strategy with the jury, convincing them to make the big, bad media giant pay — an unorthodox way to pursue a libel case.
Even so, I stand by what I wrote. A little more care in presentation and reporting would have made this David versus Goliath approach impossible to attempt. Here’s hoping that mistake won’t cost all of us who are trying to keep government accountable to the people.
Rick Henderson is editor-in-chief of Carolina Journal.