Let's pretend journalists applaud Sherrod threat to sue Breitbart

Shirley Sherrod says she plans to sue conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, the Associated Press reports from San Diego: “Speaking Thursday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Sherrod said she would definitely sue over the video that took her remarks out of context”:

Sherrod said she had not received an apology from Breitbart and no longer wanted one. “He had to know that he was targeting me,” she said.

Does she have a winning case? Probably not.

For one thing, the alleged defamation (or, to be precise, the defamation that she would allege if she filed suit) took place while she was a public official and involved claims about the performance of her public duties. Thus she would have to meet the rigorous standard, set forth by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), of proving not only that Breitbart published a damaging falsehood about her but that he did so “with ‘actual malice’–that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Even if she proves that Breitbart published false and defamatory statements about her, he wins the case if he did so only negligently.

To put it in layman’s terms, she would have to demonstrate that the falsehood Breitbart published about her–the claim that the video showed “her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions”–was a lie, not just an error. But Breitbart issued a timely correction of this statement, creating a strong presumption against such an allegation. (As to video itself, Breitbart could almost certainly defend it as truthful.)

Blogger William Jacobson notes some other pitfalls for Sherrod of suing Breitbart–the most notable is that if the case went ahead, he would be able to use the discovery process to uncover new information about her and about his other adversaries whose conduct is relevant to the case, namely the NAACP and the Obama administration.

Of course, she hasn’t actually filed a lawsuit, and our guess is that a smart lawyer will advise her against it–and that if she does sue, she will end up settling in exchange for an apology or a more emphatic correction. Her threat to sue, in short, is largely an empty one, even if one can empathize with her feeling of having been wronged by Breitbart.

But one aspect of this story strikes us as passing strange: The venue in which she issued this threat was a convention of journalists. What’s more, someone who was there tells us that when she said she planned to sue, the audience applauded. Our source was careful to note that there were nonjournalists in the audience too (PR men and corporate sponsors). Still, we have to ask: What kind of journalist would applaud the threat of a defamation lawsuit?

Competetive Enterprise Institute sues NASA over warming docs

This morning in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is filing suit against NASA, calling the erstwhile space agency to account for its nearly three-year stonewall of access to internal documents exposing an abuse of taxpayer funds to advance the global warming agenda.

Along the way to this point, we have begun revealing how NASA is running a third-party advocacy website out of NASA facilities, at taxpayer expense, to assail "skeptics" and promote the highly suspect basis for a specific policy agenda. This campaign also helped to elevate the particular fiefdom in question (James Hansen's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS) in terms of budget and stature. It has also elevated the scientists involved, professionally, at the expense of the taxpayer they are working to stick with the biggest economic intervention in our history (one I detail in my new book "Power Grab").

In this process, if only thanks to pressure on NASA after a December 2009 news story about their games, we have already obtained important emails among 2,000 or so pages released. These include an admission to USA Today's weather editor that NASA GISS is just a modeling office, using the temperature record of ...CRU, the ClimateGate outfit. That means their "independent temperature record" is actually a recapitulation of one that ...doesn't exist, but was withdrawn as a result of ClimateGate when the custodians admitted they actually lost all original data.

So whether the CRU claims were actually made up, as seems entirely plausible reading that crowd's own nasty anti-scientific campaign in their own words, it is as good as made up, meaning non-existent, for any legal or scientific purpose. So we already know that two of the four supposed "independent temperature records" are down the drain. And they're the only two subjected to anything resembling scrutiny.