1ST AMENDMENT ON TRIAL

WND takes $165 million lawsuit to Supreme Court

Shield laws endangered in case brought by Al Gore supporter
Posted: May 30, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


WND is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Tennessee ruling that could banish – nationwide – shield law protections like those that protected Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their pursuit of the Watergate scandal.

Specifically, WND is challenging a Tennessee ruling in the civil case that would require reporters to identify their confidential sources.

"If this is law, all President Nixon needed to do in order to retain his presidency is sue Woodward and Bernstein for defamation, force them into this Hobson's Choice and, by presumption, establish that the information attributed to the confidential source was false," said attorney Larry Parrish, who is handling the appeal of a Tennessee lawsuit brought by a top Al Gore fundraiser.

"The alternative for Woodward and Bernstein would have been to disclose the name of Deep Throat and suffer a breach of confidence judgment in favor of Deep Throat," he said.

The appeal to the Supreme Court is in a landmark $165 million defamation lawsuit involving WND, in which a Tennessee appeals court banned WND from defending itself based on the truth of a series of articles during the 2000 presidential election, because they included information from a confidential source to which WND didn't have access.

Parrish earlier suggested to the Tennessee Supreme Court that allowing reporters to use confidential sources would bring the state into alignment with pronouncements from the U.S. Supreme Court.

And Sam Cole, a lawyer for free-lance reporters Charles C. Thompson II and Tony Hays, who wrote the articles, suggested the Tennessee state law in question could be interpreted as "impeding" a free press and violating the U.S. Constitution ban on such limits.

But the Tennessee Supreme Court refused even to hear the case, and left standing a lower court decision that requires reporters to reveal their confidential news source or abdicate their right to use the truth of the statements as a defense in the lawsuit. WND's situation is complicated by the same requirement because the news agency does not even know the identity of confidential sources used by the reporters.

"I know many of my colleagues in the press care about the First Amendment," said Joseph Farah, editor and founder of WND. "Anyone who cares about the First Amendment needs to start caring about this monumental case. This has the potential to be bigger than New York Times v. Sullivan. Yet little media interest has been stirred."

The 2000 reports by the free-lance writers mostly documented allegations of corruption involving then-Vice President Al Gore and others in Gore's home state. Some Tennessee observers believe the series had such impact that it was responsible for Gore losing the state – and thus the presidential election. Had Gore won his home state, the disputed Florida vote in 2000 would have been meaningless and Gore would have had enough electoral votes to become president.

The reports included information about a Savannah, Tenn., auto dealer, friend of Gore and Democrat activist Clark Jones, who brought the action and has been determined by the courts to be a public figure.

Jones, who raised more than $100,000 for Gore's presidential campaign, alleges personal embarrassment and humiliation from the articles, which said he reportedly intervened in a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation probe into narcotics trafficking in Hardin County in 1999. The car dealer also alleges the articles implicated him in the 1980 arson of his own business, the Jones Motor Company, and also pegged him as a suspected drug dealer.

Parrish said the decision, if not changed, would be disastrous for the news industry.

"Because of the Internet invading the news dissemination business, it's to a point that the rules for the entire nation will be determined by the state with the most restrictive rules of law," Parrish said. Almost every newspaper, broadcast station or news service posts information on websites, and nothing can prevent those postings from being downloaded in any location, in this case Tennessee.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55813[/code]