Study Hall Digest 2/25/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

It’s Been a Week for Legal Challenges to Journalism (Or Has It?)

The family of Nicholas Sandmann, the MAGA hat-wearing urchin who made news last month when footage circulated of him grinning smugly in the face of a Native American elder on the National Mall, is suing the Washington Post for $250 million over its coverage of the incident, claiming it published a story without conducting a full investigation and ignoring the entirety of the video footage. $50 million of that staggering figure is for damage done, while the rest is for punitive damages, to “teach the Post a lesson it will never forget.”

But it seems that thirst for revenge may be the lawsuit’s undoing. Legal experts told Vice News that if Sandmann’s family were only seeking compensation for damage done, their attorney would only have to prove negligence. Because they’re seeking punitive damages, they have to prove “actual malice” — a very high standard that will be extremely difficult to prove.

That standard was established in a landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, which swatted down attempts from Southern politicians to discourage newspapers from covering the civil rights movement through expensive libel lawsuits. The decision established broad protections for the press by making it more difficult for public figures to sue for libel.

Coincidentally, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this past week called for the Supreme Court to revisit that decision, claiming it is unconstitutional (Trump has previously declared his intention to “open up” libel laws so he can more easily sue newspapers). For what it’s worth, John Q. Barrett, a constitutional law professor at St. John’s University, told WNYC’s The Takeaway he doesn’t believe the decision is in any real danger, noting no other justices have joined Thomas and it seems unlikely that any will. “This is a well worked out boundary of First Amendment protection, and it works,” he told WNYC.

Barrett also shrugged off Sandmann’s lawsuit, calling it “frivolous — Sandmann, he said, “was a limited purpose public figure and participated in public speech, injected himself in protests” by acting as he did in the national mall.

So it seems unlikely the Sandmann lawsuit will prevail or that New York Times vs. Sullivan will be overturned — but at a time when anti-press rhetoric is heated and vitriolic, it seems an alarming warning shot to journalists — maybe in particular those tackling dicey territory with few established ethics as a blueprint. At what point is an otherwise private person, acting in a public square, a limited- purpose public figure? I’d argue Sandmann unambiguously met that standard (though the national coverage of the incident became overblown, in my opinion) but these are calls journalists have to make consistently about unique situations, many in which an amateurauer videographer has already tossed the content onto Twitter or Youtube.

Whatever the outcome, Sandmann’s family clearly has money to burn. And the last thing we want is for rich assholes to be able to sue publications into oblivion.

Pinterest Takes a Stand on Conspiracy Theories

Searching “vaccine” on Facebook quickly leads users down a rabbit hole of anti-vaccine pages, even yielding autofill suggestions like “vaccination re-education discussion forum.”

Facebook has yet to act on this front, but Pinterest is providing a blueprint for how social networks can tackle nefarious search results. Julie Carrie Wong wrote there is a “data void” when it comes to vaccine results because scientists and experts aren’t constantly producing new research on the subject (the science is already in on the subject, it turns out) — so there’s a void conspiracy theorists can fill with their bile. Pinterest has thus tackled this by creating a “blacklist” of search items. They’ve also banned anti-vacc boards and blocked users from pinning from anti-vacc sites.

Pinterest shows that where there is a will, there is a way for social networks to block nefarious content. So will Facebook or Twitter follow suit? That remains to be seen. (Remember, Twitter already blocks Nazi content by law in Germany, it just chooses not to in the US.) Facebook certainly doesn’t have a promising history of tackling ethical issues quickly. “For its 15 year history, Facebook’s general approach has been to build something new w/o considering potential harms, launch and push for growth, ignore critics until the US press gets involved, apologize and promise a fix in the future, keep creating problems in the meantime,” Wong wrote in a thread on the subject.

Are Invoices a Thing of the Past?? (Please God Deliver Us From Invoices)

Imagine a world where you get paid the second your story goes live — no waiting 30 days OR MORE for a paycheck, no repeated follow-up emails, no anxiously contemplating blasting a publication on Twitter or threatening legal action. Matt Saincome, founder of The Hard Times (The Onion of punk news) has taken an unprecedented step towards making that dream a reality in launching OutVoice, a payment solution embedded into a publication’s CMS that turns the “publish” button into a “publish and pay” button. Study Hall spoke to Saincome about the service, which is currently expanding its beta version and gearing up for an official (tbd) launch.

• OutVoice is already compatible with WordPress and Drupal — if your site runs on one of those systems, OutVoice is available for download here.
• Saincome is meeting with clients who use different Content Management Systems and figuring out how to cater to their needs — the goal is for OutVoice to be a “one-stop shop for everyone,” he explained. After this coming week, he will have met with about a dozen clients.
• All else being equal, publications that use OutVoice would have a competitive edge over those that do not, Saincome said. Say a freelancer who writes about gaming is deciding between five outlets to pitch. “If you are the one who uses OutVoice and the other four don’t, you know all the most talented gaming freelancers are going to pitch for you,” said Saincome.
• It’s worth pointing out that several companies, including Vox Media, already do automatic payment upon publication. It also doesn’t change the hassle of waiting for an article to actually get published.

Longread of the Week: The Verge this morning published a harrowing look inside the lives of Facebook’s content moderators, who are paid less than $30,000 a year to moderate graphic, troublint content and suffer from symptoms of trauma long after.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Prominent Twitter personality (and supposed woman) Elle Oh Hell revealed he is a MAN who has been impersonating his WIFE. It’s like a mass-catfishing scam?!! Only on Twitter.

— USA Today reporters set out to dig through old yearbooks in light of recent blackface controversies, only to discover their editor had published a yearbook that contained a blackface photo. I mean…it certainly drives home a point about the prevalence of casual racism!

— Taylor Lorenz at The Atlantic spoke to a bunch of kids going through the fairly unprecedented journey of discovering they already have online presences. Some were uncomfortable with what felt like a violation, others were elated, noting they felt famous. This quote to me was particularly bone-chilling: “I don’t want to live in a hole and only have two pics of me online. I want to be a person who is a person. I want people to know who I am.”

— Elon Green for the Columbia Journalism Review spoke to the two reporters who broke the Bryan Singer story — both writers are on the masthead of Esquire, so how did the story end up in The Atlantic? Despite having over 50 sources, being meticulously corroborated and being vetted by a lawyer, Hearst’s chief content officer Kate Lewis was unconvinced. (“It seems to me you’ve got a bunch of guys who had consensual sex with Bryan Singer,” she told the reporters. “And they’re all troubled.”) Not a good look for Esquire…again.

— We were all united by terror this past week when it emerged that Aaron Sorkin may be rebooting The Newsroom, leading us to envision the UNBEARABLE SANCTIMONY with which he would fictionalize a newsroom in the age of Trump. FEAR NOT — IT WAS A FALSE ALARM. Anyway, here’s a seven-minute scene of journalists doing journalism to Coldplay’s “Fix You.”