![]() Nunes sued Lizza and Hearst in September 2019, a year after publication of Lizza’s article “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.” The article cited anonymous sources saying Nunes’ family’s farm’s used undocumented immigrant labor as he supported anti-immigration President Donald Trump. District courts ultimately dismissed all of those bids appeals in some are pending. He’s also sued Twitter in a bid to learn the identities of anonymous parody accounts and the defunct while alleging Twitter facilitated their defamation. The reinstatement of the lawsuit against Esquire and Lizza was a rare win for Nunes, who since 2019 has also sued CNN, the Washington Post, and research firm GPS Fusion for defamation. “Generally courts have treated the political domain as a wild west of ‘shoot first ask questions later, don’t worry about the truth because it’s a rough and tumble political world.’” ‘Actual Malice’ “I actually applaud the court for saying we need to reinstall the guardrails,” Plakas said. Generally courts have treated the political domain as a wild west of ‘shoot first ask questions later, don’t worry about the truth because it’s a rough and tumble world.’ - Lee Plakas I actually applaud the court for saying we need to reinstall the guardrails. Many seem to “presume there are no guardrails” or concern for truth in the political arena, he said. Plakas of Plakas Mannos, who helped Ohio bakers win a $31 million dollar defamation lawsuit against Oberlin College currently on appeal, said entities shouldn’t be able to retweet known falsehoods with impunity. Not everyone saw the ruling as problematic. Still, she said the finding concerned her, as news organizations should get “the broadest possible latitude” for this kind of reporting. Sullivan, which has increasingly come under fire, Kirtley said. The court stopped short of taking up Nunes’ request to flout the “actual malice” standard from the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in NY Times v. The Eighth Circuit noted that courts have ruled that certain references or links to old articles didn’t constitute republication, but the decisions “do not hold categorically that hyperlinking to an original publication never constitutes republication.” It said, for example, that an evening edition of a morning newspaper is a new publication that reaches a new audience. Kirtley said old guidelines for what constitutes a new publication may not make as much sense in the context of social media. “It is a very very tricky area and not very well parsed in the law at this point.” But it is saying that, as a matter of law, the court is not buying the idea that a retweet is not a new publication,” said Jane Kirtley, a media ethics and law professor at the University of Minnesota. “This is not the final ruling in this case. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) shows documents that he wants Fiona Hill, former top Russia advisor to the White House, and David Holmes, political counselor, to receive before they provide testimony in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump on November 21, 2019. If posting an old link or retweeting can be considered a new publication, it could create new liability for defamation if what the poster knows or should know has evolved since something was first published. That put the court into a contested area of First Amendment and defamation law: how to apply print-publication definitions to social media, where a single tweet can instantly put an old article in front of a new audience of millions. But it added that Lizza may have crossed the line when he sent a tweet linking to his 2018 Esquire article after he was sued for defamation over it. recklessly disregarded the truth when it first published Lizza’s article about Nunes. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled Nunes (R-Calif.) failed to plausibly allege that writer Ryan Lizza and publisher Hearst Magazine Media Inc. Devin Nunes’ libel lawsuit over an Esquire article raises new questions about how the Supreme Court’s half-century-old “actual malice” standard for public figure defamation liability applies in the digital age. Originally published in Bloomberg Law, September 20, 2021, 5:00 AM Updated: September 21, 2021, 4:06 PM Nunes Libel Case Raises Actual-Malice Liability for Retweets (1) ![]()
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