One of the things all news websites have in common is bylines, this NewsBusters piece even has one. It’s how news outlets let you know who wrote a particular article; it could have one or multiple authors and/or contributors. But during a defamation hearing against The Associated Press on Thursday, their lawyer argued that punitive damages couldn't be sought because there were no records of who authored or even edited the allegedly defamatory article about Navy veteran Zachary Young.
As NewsBusters previously reported, Young accused the AP of defamation stemming from a report they did covering his victory over CNN in a defamation trial earlier this year. Young took issue with how the AP reported that he “helped smuggle people out of Afghanistan;” and later pointed to the AP Stylebook to argue that it accused him of the crime of human smuggling.
According to the argument put forward by the AP’s co-counsel Paul Safier to Judge William Henry of Florida’s 14th Judicial Circuit, they don’t know how the word “smuggle” made it into their article:
Actual malice, as your Honor’s aware, revolves around the state of mind of those responsible for the publication. The question is: what did they know and when did they know it? Here, we have no record of about who did what.
The whole case is based on the use of the word ‘smuggle,’ or, you know, the one sentence that contained the word smuggle. We don’t know who wrote that sentence. We don’t know who approved that sentence. We don’t know what the people who wrote and approved that sentence thought they were conveying about Mr. Young. And we don’t know what they knew about the evidence as it came out in the CNN case.
***The complete post is on NewsBusters***