Digest 10/25/2021

Defamation by Twitter, German Media's #MeToo Minute, and more.

NUNES VS. LIZZA VS. MODERN JOURNALISM

35 news organizations have signed an amicus brief in hopes of convincing the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a September ruling in the case between Rep. Devin Nunes and Politico reporter Ryan Lizza. The brief concerns Lizza’s 2018 Esquire piece about Nunes’s family’s dairy farm. While the claims were initially tossed, the 8th Circuit later determined that linking to an article that had been accused of defamation could be considered a republication of the defamation.

Outlets like the Associated Press, BuzzFeed News, The Daily Beast, Insider, and even Fox News took issue with the ruling, putting their weight behind a brief that says the September decision, among other things, incentivizes “meritless libel litigation by giving public-official and public-figure plaintiffs the power to effectively deter anyone from repeating a disfavored statement by filing a lawsuit denying its truth, thereby rendering any repetition a publication with actual malice.” 

This decision, which already confused legal experts, appears to have been made based on a misunderstanding of social media and its role in journalism. Ruling that simply linking to an article constitutes republication would significantly deter journalists and users from sharing information out of fear that the material could be accused of being defamatory, and therefore implicate them in the “republishing” of it. The ability to freely share and access information is a pillar of effective journalism, and this ruling would threaten how we consume and discuss news in the 21st century.

“The panel’s outlying contrary conclusion creates conditions under which not only news publishers, but anyone who links to other material, can be liable both for what they say and for what they link to and reference online,” the brief reads. “That threatens to upend how information is disseminated and sourced today, and to drastically reduce the flow of information to the public.”

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A TWITTER EULOGY FOR THE BELIEVER

Back in February, the Los Angeles Times reported that Joshua Wolf Shenk, editor-in-chief of The Believer, exposed himself to staff members while on a company Zoom call. An anonymous open letter published by a handful of employees at The Believer argued the LA Times story didn’t go far enough, describing Shenk as “an inattentive and negligent boss who created a fractured workplace rife with pay and labor inequalities, and whose behavior on the Zoom call matched a pattern of callousness and abusive disregard for the staffers who worked under him.”

Last week, Off The Record published a report on the uncertain future of the magazine, and owner Black Mountain Institute at University of Nevada-Las Vegas swiftly confirmed with the announcement that The Believer will publish its final issue in February/March 2022. Jennifer Keene, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UNLV, described the move as a financial decision, but former employees blame the recent scandal and subsequent mismanagement following Shenk’s resignation.

On Twitter, former employees, contributors, and readers of The Believer shared their dismay at the disappointing outcome after an almost 20-year run.

https://twitter.com/vauhinivara/status/1450837364813742092?s=20

https://twitter.com/susanaferreira/status/1450575269434171403

https://twitter.com/nhyphenc/status/1450600550567972867?s=20

https://twitter.com/jeremylybarger/status/1450559226095489025?s=20

https://twitter.com/lindsayzoladz/status/1450874811341852674?s=20

https://twitter.com/jilnotjill/status/1450843773475467270?s=20

https://twitter.com/harmancipants/status/1450895397099085824?s=20

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GERMAN MEDIA’S SHORT-LIVE #METOO MINUTE

When Ben Smith broke the news last week in his NYT column that the editor-in-chief at the widest-circulating daily in Germany, the Bild Zeitung, had allegedly abused his power to engage in sexual relationships with subordinates, German media went into a tizzy. The allegations against Bild’s editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt weren’t exactly new: Germany’s Der Spiegel had already reported them back in March. But Bild’s parent company, Axel Springer, recently bought out Politico, bringing questions about the company’s business culture to both sides of the Atlantic. 

At the heart of the story is the investigative work of Juliane Löffler, a reporter at BuzzFeed in Berlin, who picked up where Der Spiegel left off and uncovered new details through exclusive (anonymous) interviews about the accusations and the company’s handling of them in the 12-day investigation that followed the story in March. The compliance investigation, undertaken by corporate law firm Freshfields at Springer’s behest, claimed to show there was no wrongdoing; having inter-company affairs, after all, is not against the corporate code of conduct at Axel Springer (or the majority of German companies, for that matter, as they later noted). 

Löffler’s story was set to publish in Germany simultaneously, but was killed at the behest of BuzzFeed News Deutschland’s new owner, Dirk Ippen; the NYT went through with their English-language version without them. Suddenly, a story about sexual misconduct in the workplace — which 1 in 4 women in Germany face — quickly became a story about press freedom as the mostly white male media lamented the story’s death more than the contents of Löffler’s reporting. Her reporting (later published in Der Spiegel), claimed that Reichelt had promised promotions to interns, trainees, and permalancers, sent lewd late night texts, and had mid-day jaunts in hotels with them near Springer’s offices in the heart of Berlin.

The day after Smith’s NYT story, Reichelt was relieved of his duties. Not for abuse of power but for telling “untruths” about his affairs. 

Coined, somewhat inaccurately, as Germany’s #MeToo moment, the story has shifted again in scope as the GerMan media landscape struggles with its discomfort over discussions about abuse of power (which, to quote Jenny Holzer, should come as no surprise), perhaps because so few of the top editors are not cis men. Instead, the other men-in-chief at the country’s newspapers and digital media houses called for the resignation of Springer Chairman and CEO, Matthias Döpfner, from his other role as head of a prominent newspaper association. Their reason has less to do with the accusations against Reichelt (solidified by a second report published in Der Spiegel) but rather for an aside in the NYT story: a text message he claims was ironic and taken out of context comparing Germany’s COVID-19 protocols to something straight out of East Germany. Never mind the Bild has been known to republish private text messages of victims of crimes without their permission. (Until 2012, the paper also printed topless photos of women below the fold—now they’ve found their home on the interior pages.) This is certainly something different. The lingering questions are big: Why did it take a New York newspaper to get this long rumored and made-in-Germany story any attention? And of course, will the German media landscape learn something about the younger generation of media workers’ disdain for toxic workplace cultures or continue harping on about just how prudish Americans are for not allowing sexual misconduct? – Courtney Tenz

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Media reporter Max Tani is leaving The Daily Beast to join Politico’s West Wing Playbook in December.

— BuzzFeed News has added Emily Baker-White, CNET’s Rich Nieva, and former Huffington Post India editor-in-chief Aman Sethi to its tech team. 

— Per a memo from The Washington Post, Cameron Barr has been named senior managing editor and Kat Downs Mulder joint chief product officer and managing editor. Additionally, managing editor Krissah Thompson has added features and the climate/environment team to her oversight portfolio. 

— The City’s Christine Chung and The Guardian U.S’s Amanda Holpuch have joined the New York Times express desk. Vimal Patel, who was already working for the desk on a temporary basis, has now joined permanently. 

— Marisol Flores-Aguirre has joined Bitch Media as the new CEO. 

— Paula Mejia has joined the Los Angeles Times as an editor for the arts section.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams is leaving Harper’s Magazine after the next issue, reports Gawker. He is allegedly leaving for a contributing role at The Atlantic that, per one source, is a “contractual arrangement” to write six articles a year for a whopping $150,000. 

— Sage Lazzaro is joining Insider as an enterprise and tech editor. 

— Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the new managing editor of Autostraddle.

— Delilah Gray is the new weekend editor at SheKnows.

— Joshua Bote is now the assistant news editor at SFGate.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— G/O Media, which owns websites like Gizmodo, Jezebel, and The Onion, required employees to return to the office last week. However, The Daily Beast reports that a “significant portion” of the editorial teams refused to return as part of a longstanding resistance to G/O Media’s return-to-office plans. The company is requiring vaccinations and has implemented a rotating WFH schedule, but a letter signed by over 80 employees argues that there is no reason to believe they are less productive working from home, and that their specific safety concerns about the possibility of breakthrough cases have not been addressed. 

— Turns out Facebook, a company that regularly embargoes its announcements with journalists, doesn’t feel the same way about the practice when it applies to journalists agreeing to embargos in order to access more damning docs on the company. 

— Not sure how I feel about followers of celebrity gossip Instagram account Deux Moi becoming a source pool, especially when these sources routinely misidentify any old man in Vermont as Bernie Sanders.