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JWeinCom on 04 May 2022
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padib said:
JWeinCom said:

There is no law we can make that is going to be perfectly fair in every case. Holding newspapers and other platforms responsible for everything anyone says would prevent them from ever allowing any legitimate victim of abuse from ever speaking. I think holding the person who created the lie responsible is probably the best we're going to do.

At any rate even though Johnny Depp was wronged (based on what I know, I haven't been following super close), I don't really see how the fault lies with with the Washington Post. If the claims were false it makes sense to hold Heard responsible, and I think you could argue against Disney and other companies for taking actions based on only allegations (although that also has problems). As for the Washington Post, I don't see why there should be liability.

Setting aside the first amendment, if we were going to make a claim about this it would be, to simplify, negligence. Essentially a negligence claim is entity X had a duty that they failed and someone was hurt as a direct result. So, what would be the duty here? If you'd say there duty is to only to report what other people are saying when they know it to be 100% factually, I don't think that's a reasonable duty to impose. And even if you want to impose that duty, it's also hard to say that the damage was a direct result of the op ed since other entities with freedom of choice, i.e. Disney, WB, etc., could have responded differently.

I'm personally not American so the charter of the US does not mean as much to me as it does to you and probably others, and of course the JD case is an American one so I understand your reply. I'm speaking in terms of the sense of justice in general. Newspapers have been very irresponsible in the way they are using information in a way that causes injustice and more problems than to not report. I'm not for censorship either. But responsibility is lacking here.

IMHO

I agree though that Disney is more accountable than WSJ here. Still the newspapers are starting to upset me.

But, what exactly in this case did the Washington Post do wrong that we should punish them for?

In a domestic violence case, usually there are really only two people who will know what happened.  Even people who knew the couple couldn't say all the things that happened behind closed doors. There is pretty much no way they could have known whether or not the relationship was abusive, or who was abusing who. And, they did not report this as fact, as it is clearly labeled as an op-ed from Amber.

So, again, I'm not sure what they did wrong here. Is a media outlet liable whenever someone lies on their platform? Even when they had no real way of determining that? I actually wrote a whole 40 page note about how speech tort laws are overrestrictive to potential plaintiffs, but if you hold the Post liable in this situation, then you create a standard where no outlet could ever allow anyone to say anything, unless the outlet has personal firsthand knowledge of it. At the very least, if we hold the Post liable here, virtually no victim of any type of crime or abuse could ever be allowed to speak on any platform ever. Even if it would lead to a fair result in this case, and I do not believe that it would under US law or otherwise, this would lead to an incredible level of censorship.   

Last edited by JWeinCom - on 04 May 2022