The Drudge Retort

Is Matt Drudge Guilty of Libel?

Mike Godwin from the February 1998 issue

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The fact is, we do know what the rules are, but what most of the pundits have yet to grasp is how the old rules play out in new ways on the Net. For example, one of the reasons a newspaper can still be made to pay a libel defendant even when it has published a retraction is that the retraction (one may reasonably argue) never has quite the impact that the original defamation did--not even if it's printed on the front page, and not even if the falsity of the report is further publicized by the filing of a libel lawsuit. That's why Richard Jewell, the hero of the Olympic bombing whose reputation was seriously damaged by the FBI's irrational identification of him as a suspect in the crime, and by the press's exacerbation of that damage with its own wildly speculative reports, is still in the process of extracting tidy monetary settlements from news organizations around the country. Publications such as Time took months to clear the air--quite a contrast to the immediacy of Drudge's retraction.

This has not prevented would-be legal pundits from dithering about the Net. "If anything, a libel on the Web is more permanent in impact even though it is evanescent in form," University of Virginia law professor Robert O'Neil told New York Times reporter Carl Kaplan. O'Neil's comment is an odd one from someone who's also director of The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression, but not untypical of remarks by a legal commentator in these days of social panic about the Internet. What the commentators in this case have somehow missed is that ink on dead trees is a little more permanent than your average webzine and that Blu-menthal's sufferings, whatever they may have been, don't hold a candle to Jewell's.

And for that Blumenthal has two phenomena to thank: the immediacy of news reporting on the Net, and the willingness of the media to sensationalize any story that makes the Net look scary. Operating in tandem, these factors have made the retraction a bigger story than the libel ever was--which in turn makes Blumenthal's lawsuit look a lot more like opportunistic overreaching and a lot less like justice in action.