Word: libelousness
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While McChristian testified, he did not look at his former boss, who sat 20 feet away. Westmoreland, the plaintiff in a $120 million libel suit against CBS News, has charged that a 1982 documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, falsely accused him of "conspiracy at the highest levels of military intelligence" to mislead President Lyndon Johnson about the success of the war of attrition against Communist insurgents. CBS contends that the documentary was true and that much of the program's evidence came from Westmoreland's colleagues...
...reaching their verdict, the jurors said that TIME's mistaken report that the information was actually part of Appendix B "aggravated" the defamatory interpretation they read into the disputed paragraph. But the judge had agreed with TIME on this point and had told the jury that the alleged libel did not center on the content of the appendix but rather on the substance of what TIME's paragraph said--namely, that Sharon discussed revenge with the Phalangists before they were sent into the camps...
...most editors and libel lawyers welcomed the distinction the jury made on actual malice. "I'm impressed with the way the system worked," said Floyd Abrams, a New York lawyer who specializes in First Amendment cases. "Here the jury distinguished between a mistake and a lie. Most juries have not been able to do that, and consequently we have had a 75% reversal rate (of verdicts for the plaintiff) on appeal." The Washington Post editorialized: "The procedural technique of having a jury decide each element of the suit separately can help ensure that the difficult standard for libel claims...
...that too." To Eugene Roberts, executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "it was clearly a political suit." The trend toward such suits, he said, amounts to "open season on freedom of expression." Abrams, however, predicted that TIME's ultimate victory would cause public officials to "think twice" before launching libel suits, "because they may lose on actual malice...
...despite the Sharon verdict in TIME's favor, which might suggest that the test of "actual malice" is as sturdy as ever, the growing number of libel suits involving stories on the official conduct of government figures threatens to strike at the core of what the Supreme Court sought to preserve in New York Times vs. Sullivan: a hearty and robust debate on issues of public importance. Many Americans may relish the prospect of seeing journalists on the defensive in a courtroom. But ultimately they may decide that the possible consequences--a less vigilant press, a dimmer light cast...