By Michael Miner
In February, with Glass saddled up as star witness, D.A.R.E. sued Rolling Stone for $50 million. The suit alleges that Rolling Stone limited its fact checking to comparing Glass’s manuscript with his New Republic article, which D.A.R.E. had condemned on publication. When Glass was exposed 14 months ago, “the New Republic published an apology and retraction,” says D.A.R.E. attorney Skip Miller, explaining why one magazine was sued but not the other.
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Though both law and journalism are about getting at the truth, when their protocols collide they strew the landscape with paradox and irony. Or is it farce? The second most famous retraction of 1998 was by CNN and Time magazine, the Time Warner sisters that broke the sensational Tailwind story. Tailwind was the operation that allegedly had a Special Forces commando unit innocuously named the Studies and Operations Group (SOG) assassinating American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam war by dropping sarin nerve gas on them, taking out a village of civilians in the process. That was tear gas, not nerve gas, responded SOG alumni, and there were no defectors and there was no village. The CNN broadcast, “Valley of Death,” and the Time article were so passionately condemned–by CNN’s own military analyst, among others–that CNN hired prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams to find out what was what.
“What do you do when a source who confirms your story requests confidentiality and then states publicly that you never contacted him?” Editor & Publisher magazine quotes Oliver as saying. “I promised to go to jail to protect him. Then he sued me.”
Like April Oliver, Krupski countersued, accusing her old employer of defamation. She was no thief, she asserted; she’d always copied important documents for her editors, and now she needed those files to defend herself in case her reporting was ever challenged. What’s more, she’d taken some of those papers to shred them, thereby keeping faith with the confidants who’d slipped them to her.
Shreds of Evidence
Under the headline “Sole Aim to Clear Name,” the Tribune described a legal battle by three former members of the Illinois Athletic Club seeking reinstatement. “According to a statement made in the evening by Henry Horner, attorney for Mr. Eichberg, the trouble occurred last fall. Eichberg, Brown, and C.G. Seasinghaus were expelled by the board of directors on the ground that they were guilty of conduct unbecoming members….
