WhatFinger


Fake news becomes costly

UK's Daily Mail apologizes, pays $2.9 million settlement for false stories about Melania Trump



The only bad news here, if you want to call it that, is that the Daily Mail is generally not a left-wing rag. I'd be a lot more psyched if it was the Guardian being forced to own up and pay up. But all media have the same potential for harm when they blatantly publish lies, so when any member of the profession is forced to suffer for having done so, all shudder. That's good news for people who care about truth - something the news media as a collective institution is not a friend of.
Melania Trump was an especially hard-to-resist target during the campaign because of her history as an international model and the ready availability of racy photos of her. If someone was willing to come forth with salacious rumors about her past, well . . . think back to the panic going on during the campaign about the horrifying prospect, however remote, that the madman lunatic Trump might somehow actually win. Sure, Hillary probably had it in the bag, but what if? Just to be sure, any potential weapon against him had to be deployed, and that included slandering his wife if that was what it took. So in August, the Daily Mail did just that, a fact for which it has now both apologized and paid handsomely:
In a joint statement, the parties said the Mail retracted its false statements that Trump “provided services beyond simply modeling” and agreed to pay damages and costs. The total settlement for the U.S. and U.K. lawsuits was about $2.9 million, according to a person familiar with the settlement who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the information, which was not released in court.

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Trump sued the Daily Mail in Britain and Mail Online in the United States over an August 2016 article, which ran in the newspaper under the headline “Racy photos and troubling questions about his wife’s past that could derail Trump.” In a lawsuit filed in New York in February, the first lady’s attorneys argued that the report was false and damaged her ability to develop “multi-million dollar business relationships” based on her status as a well-known figure and “successful businesswoman.” As part of the settlement, the Mail published an apology, saying “we accept that these allegations about Mrs. Trump are not true and we retract and withdraw them.”
The First Lady had asked for $150 million in damages, so this is not a total victory in an economic sense. I suppose $2.9 million is chump change for the wife of Donald Trump (although if she's looking for something to do with it, she can contact me). But the retraction and apology are a complete vindication of her personally and of her reputation - especially encouraging because it's very difficult for a public figure to win a libel suit. It shouldn't be. A lie is a lie, regardless of who you're telling it about.

Hopefully this sets a precedent that scares other media out of such behavior. Even though this was not a U.S. media outlet, the case was in an American court, which illustrates that there are limits to what you can say even when you're talking about a public figure - and the First Lady of the United States is obviously a very public figure. Turns out even she has some rights against being slandered in the press. The media usually express horror whenever a legal action results in a diminution of their freedom to say what they want, but that's hard when it requires you to defend the publication of outright falsehoods. I think that in the heat of the election campaign, with so much heat coming down on Trump and everyone around him, some media got caught up in the fury and got the impression they could do and say whatever they wanted without suffering any consequences. Everyone hates Trump so who's going to do anything about it? Election Day tore a hole in that argument. Now the legal process has ripped what was left of it to shreds. No, you can't just tell lies about a member of the Trump family and expect impunity. The next step is to see them pay a price for reporting falsehoods about policy and governance, so often stemming from their reliance on anonymous sources with axes to grind. That is a much harder problem to solve, although Trump has certainly inflicted a lot of discomfort on them for it just by the way he deals with them. Maybe the cumulative result of all this will be that no one believes the legacy media anymore, and they'll all be forced out of business. That would be outstanding. You'd still be able to get information. It just wouldn't come filtered by people more interested in pushing an agenda than they are in telling you the truth.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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