| You rarely see someone trot their lawyers out first thing when dealing with media errors. So it naturally caused my eyebrow to arch when I read the other day that Michigan Messenger had received, first thing, a letter from attorneys representing Sovereign Deed and its CEO Barrett Moore demanding a retraction of an article claiming that Moore had lied about his military service. Michigan Messenger has been kind enough to post not just the letter from Sovereign Deed, but also the response letter from their attorney asking that Sovereign Deed produce evidence that Michigan Messenger's story was false. You don't often get to see this kind of thing take place in the open, and it's an interesting exchange. There are two likely outcomes to this ... that there was some erroneous reporting, and Moore's attorneys decided to throw everything plus the kitchen sink in hopes of negotiating their way down to what they really want. However, I'm told that Tuesday's deadline came and went, and neither the Michigan Messenger nor its D.C. attorneys has since heard from Moore's attorneys, which raises the ugly possibility that the real goal in threatening the site was not to correct the public record, but to chill free speech (this is outcome number two). We'll see, I guess, because it's still pretty early in the game to start throwing around charges that Sovereign Deed has violated Michigan Messenger's First Amendment rights. Still, the thing is worth watching for a couple of reasons, and the longer it takes for the company to show its cards, the more you have to start thinking that the company was hoping to bully Michigan Messenger into silence. The first is that this would be the most significant threat to free speech involving an Internet outlet in the state of Michigan. Mike Bishop's blocked access to Blogging for Michigan last summer generated a lot of headlines, but in the end really only cut off access to the site by a handful of state computers. This, on the other hand, means cutting the story out at its knees. The second is that the company is tied to public money. If it's true that the company's CEO is responsible for making empty threats that violate Michigan Messenger's First Amendment rights, then one would hope that public bodies responsible for that would reconsider giving economic breaks to a firm with so little regard to the bedrock freedoms on which this nation was founded. |
