TALLAHASSEE — A state Senate panel on Wednesday gave initial approval to a proposal that would change the state’s defamation laws, with critics of the measure calling it unconstitutional, vague and “counterproductive.”
The proposal, sponsored by Sen. Corey Simon, R-Tallahassee, seeks to require newspapers and broadcast stations to remove false and defamatory articles and broadcasts from their websites after receiving notice that the stories aren’t true.
The bill (SB 752), approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, is rooted in coverage of a Miami man who was arrested after being accused of molesting a child at a pool party. Prosecutors later dropped charges against the man, who was awarded damages by a jury after filing a defamation lawsuit against relatives of the child.
Barry Richard, an attorney who represents the man, told the committee that two of three television stations took down stories from their websites depicting the once-successful businessman captured on camera shackled and clad in an orange jumpsuit during an initial court appearance in 2017. The third station had a policy not to remove stories from its website, according to Richard.
The experience ruined the man’s life, Richard said. Job interviews have been canceled, his wife and children have left the country and his children were asked to leave the private school they attended, Richard said.
“This shouldn’t happen,” Richard, a prominent Tallahassee lawyer who said he previously represented the Florida Press Association for two decades, told the Senate panel.
“The media receives a privilege none of us have,” Richard argued, adding that material can “stay up forever” on news outlets’ websites. “How does that make sense? Why should they be able to keep it up forever, knowing that it’s false? It just makes no sense, and it can destroy people’s lives.”
But Sam Morley, general counsel of the Florida Press Association, said a better approach would be to require publishers to update stories to include corrections to original posts.
“This way, the public has access to both the correction and the story, as opposed to forcing total erasure of the story from the internet,” Morley said.
The proposal centers on what is known as the “fair reporting privilege” that protects media outlets from being sued for defamation when they publish accurate accounts of information or data contained in official documents or statements.
Simon’s bill would remove the protection against defamation lawsuits for media outlets if they have been notified that a statement published on the internet has been found in a judicial proceeding to be false or if they receive “notice of facts that would cause a reasonable person to conclude that such a statement was false” and they fail to remove the story “from any website” the outlet controls.
Attorneys for media outlets said that part of the bill is too vague.
“What specific facts would be considered sufficient to meet this reasonable test? How would the publisher know what is reasonable, what is not? They would probably have to err on the side of removing the information if the story is largely accurate,” Morley said.
James Lake, an attorney who practices defamation law, told the committee that the measure would lead to entire articles being removed “if one sentence is disputed.”
“That’s not only overly broad, unconstitutional, it’s counterproductive, because in the situation where subsequent events have changed a story, perhaps with an acquittal, the person who’s the subject of that story would benefit from a correction or an update being published,” Lake said.
Lake, who told the Senate panel he is a Republican, warned that the bill runs counter to GOP lawmakers’ recent efforts to curb lawsuits.
“This is going to be used to punish conservative speech,” he said.
Sen. Tom Leek, R-Ormond Beach, praised the bill, saying changes to the state’s defamation standards are overdue. He pointed to a change in the bill Wednesday to limit media outlets’ obligation to remove posts to websites they control. An original version of the bill would have removed the privilege protection if stories were allowed to remain on the internet, which Leek called “an important distinction.”
“The media outlet doesn’t have control over the internet, which is why this bill is limited to them taking it down over things that they have control of, which is the website. It creates an affirmative duty to take it down, but only if you know it’s wrong and it’s false, and that’s that’s the right thing to do,” Leek said.
Sen. Rosalind Osgood, D-Fort Lauderdale, also supported the measure.
“A lot of times as elected officials, people think that they can just say what they want to say … and drag you and nothing is done about it. And it hurts your kids, it hurts your reputation,” she said. “I think that we have to begin to do something about the defamation and the, just, outright lies. We have to have a freedom of speech, but it needs to be with integrity.”
But Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, said the bill goes too far.
The circumstances involving Richard’s client were “ugly and unfortunate,” Polsky, a lawyer, said.
“It doesn’t take away the fact that it happened, and that’s what news is,” said Polsky, who was one of two committee members who voted against the measure. “I think it’s just clunky, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and there’s so much attack on (the) media now, because of our president, because of our governor. There are lawsuits left and right against very valid news organizations, and this is only going to feed into that frenzy.”
Simon, however, said people like the Miami man can be stigmatized permanently for something they didn’t do.
“I think our media should be held to a standard that, when we get it wrong, most of them should say they got it wrong,” Simon said. “Unfortunately, that’s not what happened here. They wouldn’t even print the retraction that they got it wrong. They just left up the story, and it’s created this stigma that this person will have to deal with for a lifetime.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
