The National Enquirer & Libel Suits
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The National Enquirer has a remarkable track record for avoiding libel suits using a combination of First Amendment freedoms, aggressive lawyering, and patience. In recent years, however, the newspaper has been sued successfully by several celebrities over stories that were shown to be false. The National Enquirer's main office is a structure on South East Coast Avenue in Lantana, Florida that resembles a school building. However, the flamboyant newspaper has built its reputation on hyperbole rather than straight, scholarly fact. Generoso Pope, Jr., a former C.I.A. operative, is its founding owner. He purchased the paper, then known as the New York Enquirer, in 1952. He made it famous and successful by stressing the lurid and bizarre details of crime stories and by the use of lots of celebrity gossip. The paper publishes about 3,600 stories a year, has a circulation of over 4.5 million readers and is sold primarily in supermarkets. In 1980 the paper could boast twenty years of circulation without ever going to trial on a libel suit. Meyer Kimmel, of Kaufman, Taylor, Kimmel & Miller, is credited as being the man most responsible for this unblemished record. He was hired by Pope in 1960 when the paper was still headquartered in New York, and when the paper moved to its current location in Florida in 1971, Pope remained in New York. From 1971 to 1976 Pope worked on retainer for the paper. Every story was read to him over the phone for his legal, moral, and et
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nt was presumed if the truth of the statement would prevent liability, and it was usually the publisher's duty to prove it in libel actions. This was before the recently-developed constitutional privileges, and the libel plaintiffs' success at common law was not dependent on any proof of fault or unreasonable publication by the publisher of the statement. The publisher was strictly liable if publication, defamation, and injury could be shown, ad this was so even if the publication was the result of an honest mistake or understandable oversight:
Because of the rather onerous impact of the rule of strict liability, special protection was granted to the publisher in certain settings in the form of common law privileges. These privileges generally required that, to succeed, the plaintiff had to overcome them by showing that the publisher acted out of ill will or beyond the scope of the privilege. The privileges were designed to protect expression in settings of special importance, such as statements drawn from public records, opinions expressed about public issues, and confidential communications in the employment setting.
In the United States, libel law gradually evolved state by state, and many states came to recognize the def
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Approximate Word count = 2923
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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