Word: libeling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Curtis has also made a substantial recovery from the internal revolt that shook it last year. When Editor in Chief Clay Blair Jr., whose policy of "sophisticated muckraking" involved the Post in costly libel suits, tried to oust President Matthew Culligan, Curtis dumped them both. But not before the entire organization had suffered. The Culligan-Blair regime was a textbook example of mismanagement. Now that Blair is gone and Culligan has been replaced by John Clifford, a one-time NBC vice president, the editorial operation appears to be calming down. "For years we've heard nothing but the snap...
...Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open," said the Supreme Court in 1964. In that famous decision (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan), the court ruled that a public official cannot collect libel damages even for false criticism of his official conduct unless he proves "actual malice." But who is a public official? The court did not say. As a result, lower courts have since extended the Times doctrine to reach "officials" ranging from a candidate for Congress to the law partner of a mayoral candidate...
Gilligan was later exonerated in both grand jury and departmental investigations, which held that he killed in self-defense after being attacked with a knife. As a result, last May he filed a $5,250,000 libel suit alleging that he had been falsely accused of murder by a flock of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King. Predictably, the defendants moved for dismissal on the ground that the Times doctrine stripped Gilligan of any cause for action. Predictably, Gilligan's lawyer, Roy M. Cohn, countered by claiming that the doctrine does not apply to a minor, nonelected government...
That decision placed a huge burden of proof on plaintiffs in libel cases involving public officials. Equally significant, however, was something the court did not do. It did not define "public official," and alert libel lawyers and judges began to suggest that the words could really be translated into the far more general "public figure...
...suggestion has just been declared to be law in a notable ruling of U.S. District Judge James F. Gordon in a $2,000,000 libel suit against two Louisville newspapers and a radio station. The plaintiff: former Army Major General Edwin F. Walker. The defendants, charged Walker, defamed him by publishing and broadcasting wire-service reports suggesting that he incited student race rioters at the University of Mississippi...