Word: pegler
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After a federal jury in Manhattan awarded Journalist Quentin Reynolds $175,001 in a libel suit against Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler. Hearst lawyers took their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Their argument: what Pegler had written about Reynolds (TIME, May 24, 1954, et seq.) was "innocuous and susceptible of innocent and harmless interpretations...
There was nothing wrong, said the Hearst lawyers, with Pegler's writing that "Reynolds went nuding along the public road [with] a wench." After all, "perfectly honorable people are nudists, and . . . nudism [is] not a crime." Pegler's charge that Reynolds proposed marriage to Heywood Broun's widow in the car on the way to Broun's grave was not libelous either, said the lawyers, since even the Mosaic Code imposes "upon a brother the duty of proposing to his dead brother's widow." As for Pegler's charge that Reynolds had "a yellow...
...jest. Last week Federal Judge Harold R. Medina ruled for the court: "This is a curious and unprofitable sort of jesting, as others may not view the humor in the same light . . . These explanations are wholly without merit or substance." The court unanimously upheld the $175,001 judgment against Pegler and his Hearst employers, who must pay the bill under terms of Pegler's contract. It is one of the biggest libel awards ever given by a U.S. court...
...questions of 'loyalty' at home or war in the Formosa Strait? "If the country has what the Democrats call a one-party press, the Republicans have been cheated, for they have not even been able to count on the unfailing support of David Lawrence, and in Westbrook Pegler's book Eisenhower has almost (but not quite) replaced Roosevelt as the leading villain...
...example, the $1,000,000 in insurance policies that ABC has taken out does not cover Winchell for punitive damages, i.e., where the court orders damages paid to "punish for maliciousness," as in the $175,000 paid to Author Quentin Reynolds in his suit against Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler (TIME, July 5). Winchell asked that his protection be changed to make it "foolproof." When ABC balked, he asked to end his four-year-old lifetime contract, and the ABC board agreed. By June, said Winchell, he expects to change to another network (probably NBC), and he may even produce...