Writer of the newspaper’s Town Crier column

Writer of the newspaper’s Town Crier column

Writer of the newspaper’s Town Crier column

Respond to at least two of your peers’ posts (as well as any comments made by your instructor) in a substantive manner and provide information or concepts that they may not have considered. Each response should have a minimum of 100 words. Support your position by using information from the week’s readings. You are encouraged to post your required replies earlier in the week to promote more meaningful and interactive discourse in this discussion forum. Continue to monitor the discussion forum until Day 7 and respond with robust dialogue to anyone who replies to your initial post.

The post:

The statements made by the writer of the newspaper’s Town Crier column would be considered Libel. For the defendant to make a valid argument, they would have to cite conditional privileges. However, the defendant is fighting against a private figure which means they do not have to prove actual malice. Per the First Amendment, media personnel are given freedom of speech and freedom of press. These statements in the column are not backed up by factual evidence and would be seen as false assentation of facts. The only way for a successful defense would be if these statements were made to promote a common interest. However, this column was written as a speculation. Even though the media mostly has protection under the freedom of press, the lack of factual evidence will work against them in court. Jones would be considered a private figure as he is not a well-known public figure such as a government official or a celebrity. In private figure plaintiff cases, they are not expected to prove actual malice to win defamation cases (Langvardt et al., 2019).

Jones will likely win this case because the statements made by the defendant can be considered as false statements of fact. By citing negligence, Jones will win under the first Gertz rule.

References:

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.