Word: libeling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Until recently, Ellis fought back against the press the old-fashioned way--issuing forceful denials and filing the occasional libel lawsuit. Last week, though, he launched an unprecedented pre-emptive strike. With ABC's 20/20 preparing a segment about his San Diego-based diet empire, Ellis took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and other newspapers, directing readers to a website newsinterview.com where they can see the newsmagazine's full, unedited interview with him, before ABC airs its own snippets...
Such painstaking--and painful--revisionism suggests why, three weeks before its publication and a week before the appearance of a long excerpt in Vanity Fair, a Vatican theologian had already branded Hitler's Pope a "shameful libel." Cornwell, a practicing Catholic, says he originally enlisted "on the side of all these chaps in believing Pius had had a really bad deal" at his critics' hands. But research into the lightly trod territory of Pius' decades-long German involvement before his papacy left Cornwell in a state of "moral shock," he says. "The material I had gathered amounted...
...discordance. For 300 pages, Blind Eye has Swango killing people right and left. Yet Stewart's conclusion contains a flurry of qualifying statements like "Swango is the first alleged serial killer in this century to have emerged in the guise of a physician." However inconvenient, writers have to obey libel laws; too many lawyers are watching. But where were the language police when Stewart chose the word guise? It means semblance, and if we know anything for sure, it is that Swango did not resemble a doctor...
Worse, you just don't end up with a novel. While he capitalizes handsomely on the freedom afforded by fiction (so many more people you can zing without fear of libel!), Andersen is hamstrung by the overall structure that the genre demands. His sentences may sparkle, but the book's forward motion is a sputtering lope. Its loose, digressive shape makes Turn of the Century awfully easy to put down...
...show itself and Warner Bros. (which, like TIME, is owned by Time Warner), have said they will appeal. There's a good chance they could be successful. Appellate courts tend to be more protective than juries of the media--which is why about 80% of jury verdicts in libel cases end up getting reversed...