The Greenbelt News Review is (perhaps) inordinately proud of its 54-year-old U.S. Supreme Court win over a local developer who sued the newspaper for reporting negative comments made about him in a public meeting. The case has been quoted in freedom of the press/First Amendment cases multiple times since.
Thus, the News Review was much interested in a recent case in rural Utah where a small local newspaper was sued by a developer for millions of dollars based on its reporting of public meetings on a development project. (See story in the September 11 issue of the News Review.) Despite the rather different local geography – butte versus Beltway – the case had an almost eerie similarity to the Bresler vs. Greenbelt Publishing Association situation. A local developer, angered by the vociferous local opposition he was receiving in his attempt to develop an unpopular project, sued the local newspaper that reported the public outcry.
Moral Support
The News Review contacted its fellow sufferers in Utah to make sure they knew of the precedent and found that the News Review case had, in fact, been cited in oral arguments at the start of the Utah court case. The News Review offered moral support and asked to be kept apprised.
Validation
More recently, a joyful Utah editor let us know that the case had been emphatically thrown out by the court, providing a copy of the 40+-page ruling that accompanied the case’s dismissal. The document cited a ponderous list of deficiencies and misrepresentations in the plaintiff’s case and fully upheld the newspaper’s reporting. Although the News Review’s case was not mentioned specifically in the written document, the judgment echoed the same arguments – that a newspaper was free to report the speech of others and that a statement was only defamatory if it wasn’t true.
Down the Ages
It is pleasing to think that the heroic efforts of the News Review in the late 1960s (when the newspaper kept fighting even though two lower courts had ruled against it) are still an active force against those who would muzzle a free press from accurately reporting local news.
