State Court Gives Internet Sites a License to Libel

Perhaps newspapers should have been celebrating the past couple of months, since the California Supreme Court made it safe for virtually all Web sites and Web blogs to be as inaccurate, libelous and slanderous as they like. Then again, maybe newspapers shouldn’t be so happy.

In its ruling, the state’s highest court said that no one who is libeled or slandered by material carried on a Web site can sue that Web site, no matter if it’s as large and wealthy as Google or as minuscule and poor as one that follows only a local neighborhood. The only party who can now be sued is the person who wrote the libel or slander.

There went the deep-pocket defendants most lawyers seek before taking a case on contingency. With them went the possibility for most people who have been libeled and slandered to sue.

Essentially, the court said there is so much unedited material on the Internet that no one who runs a search engine or composite Web blog can be expected to keep track of everything on it, let alone verify what’s there. In other words, no Web site need ever do the basic tasks performed by mainstream media as a matter of course (like checking the accuracy of information).

This is a ruling that on its surface appears cause for joy in newspaper executive suites for two reasons:

* It is essentially a court certification that there is never a guarantee information on the Web is accurate. Newspapers have been telling Internet users for years that much of what they’re reading is unreliable, unedited material to be believed only at their own peril. Now a court has said that’s precisely the situation.

* Because newspapers run many of the most popular and best-read Web sites, they now can feel free to carry material in their electronic editions they never would or could in their print versions. That’s because, like every other Web site, newspaper ones have suddenly become exempt from libel or slander penalties in California. So newspapers in their current extreme cutback mode can dispense with as many online edition editors as they like without worrying about legal penalties if untruths slip by a much smaller staff. Of course, if they do that, they will be making their own material as slovenly and unreliable as much of the garbage now in the blogosphere.

The big question here: If newspapers, radio and television stations have to hire editors and reporters to vet information before passing it along to the public, why shouldn’t huge and mega- profitable corporations like Yahoo and Google? What gives them the right to mislead the public willy-nilly with no penalty when newspapers and other major media can be sued for doing the same thing? The court has unanimously unleveled the playing field even more steeply than it already was. If giant Web sites had to hire staff to sift through their content and make sure it has some degree of accuracy and responsibility, perhaps there would be fewer of them, but they’d be more reliable. Perhaps newspapers wouldn’t be facing the evolutionary problems they now confront.

So this ruling is essentially favoritism. Newspapers that carry syndicated columns like this one can be held responsible when the syndicated matter is libelous. But not Web sites. This may be the time for some sharp newspaper lawyer to file an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court asserting the 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law. For newspapers hire editors and researchers by the score to fact-check and fine-tune material, partly to make sure it is not libelous.

If newspapers are smart, they’ll do all they can to overturn this decision, even if it does verify their longtime assertion that the Net contains far more trash than truth, even if it also frees their own Web sites to be as irresponsible as any bloated blog. For if Web sites and blogs were forced to be reliable and truthful, many would disappear and readers would perforce return in droves to the news sources they know must be accurate or be sued.

Tom Elias is author of The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It, now available in an updated third edition. His e-mail address is tdelias@aol.com.

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