Love Him or Hate Him, the War Against Alex Jones Is a War Against Us All

via Revolver

Last year, Infowars founder Alex Jones lost by default in a defamation case brought against him by several Sandy Hook parents, after a Texas judge ruled that Jones and his company had repeatedly failed to comply with orders to turn over certain documents during discovery. Now, a jury in Austin just ordered him to pony up millions of dollars:

Right-wing talk show host Alex Jones will have to pay the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim a little more than $4 million in compensatory damages, a jury decided Thursday, capping a stunning and dramatic case that showcased for the public the real-world harm inflicted by viral conspiracy theories.

The award from the jury was far less than what the plaintiffs, Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, had asked for. At the start of the trial, attorneys for Lewis and Heslin asked the jury to award their clients $150 million in compensatory damages. A separate, shorter trial during which punitive damages will be discussed is now expected.

[CNN]

More recently this month, the jury recommended punitive damages of more than $45 million, though that amount will almost certainly be reduced substantially due to legal limits, subsequent appeals, or a possible settlement.

Amidst all of the fanfare and controversy, it is easy to overlook just how weak the defamation case against Jones really was. The Sandy Hook parents mentioned above based their defamation claim on a 2017 NBC interview where Heslin said he held his son’s body after he was murdered. In a contemporaneous Infowars segment, reporter Owen Shroyer said that, “according to a timeline of events and a coroner’s testimony, that is not possible,” and Jones responded by calling Heslin to “clarify” his statements. Otherwise, all of Jones’s “defamatory” behavior is premised on him making wild but vague allegations of a Sandy Hook false flag by unknown forces. Virtually all of the damages, meanwhile, are based on blaming Jones for the actions of people he doesn’t even know.

Based on the alleged trauma caused by Jones’s claims, and harassment from various people who are neither Jones himself nor acting on his orders, the plaintiffs sought a staggering $150 million in damages. The $4.1 million judgment is mercifully less than that, but after punitive damages come in Jones will still be paying a massive amount. Last week, Alex Jones put Free Speech Systems LLC, the parent company for his popular InfoWars show and website, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time.

To be clear, we cannot defend the wisdom and judiciousness of Jones’ coverage of Sandy Hook. Jones himself expressed regret regarding his coverage and acknowledged he should have treated the subject differently. There is no issue more sensitive than a parent grieving a child, and journalists must always strive to cover such topics with empathy, discernment, and caution.

At the same time, it is a very dangerous precedent to set when the feelings of grieving families can be used to silence reporting — even “conspiratorial and crazy” reporting — on tragedies of national significance. The Sandy Hook tragedy was a very public and very politicized event from the beginning, and almost immediately became enveloped into a national debate about gun control. Just months after the Sandy Hook Tragedy, Connecticut passed a dramatic enhancement to its so-called “assault weapons ban.” New York and Maryland took similar action, while Senator Diane Feinstein proposed a severe assault weapons ban at the national level, which never passed.

Given the political stakes involved, it seems consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment and the spirit of a free society to allow maximum discussion and deliberation about a major tragedy serving as the catalyst for legislation, even if some of that discussion turns out to be silly, crude, cruel, irresponsible, or even harmful to the emotional state of the families affected by that tragedy.

From very early on, Connecticut took a dubious approach to balancing the sensitivities of the Sandy Hook families against the public interest in transparency. The most egregious of such responses was a Connecticut law, drafted behind closed doors and in secret, that took unprecedented steps to withhold forensic evidence related to homicides from the public:

At a time when citizens increasingly call for government transparency, the Connecticut legislature recently passed a bill to withhold graphic information depicting homicides from the public in response to records from last December’s devastation at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Though secret discussions drafting this bill reportedly date back to at least early April, the bill did not become public knowledge until an email was leaked to the Hartford Courant on May 21. The initial draft of what became Senate Bill 1149 offered wide protection specifically for families of victims of the December 14 shootings, preventing disclosure of public photographs, videos, 911 audio recordings, death certificates, and more.

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The bill as approved exempts photographs, film, video, digital or other images depicting a homicide victim from being part of the public record “to the extent that such record could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of the victim or the victim’s surviving family members.” The bill particularly protects child victims, exempting from disclosure the names of victims and witnesses under 18 years old. It would also limit disclosure of audio records of emergency and other law enforcement calls as public records, such that portions describing the homicide victim’s condition would not have to be released, though this provision will be reevaluated by a 17-member task force by May 2014.

Transparency advocates at the time were especially concerned about the implication of this law, which not only applied to Sandy Hook, but to homicides in Connecticut generally

From the beginning, this topic has raised concerns with respect to Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act and government transparency. In addition to being drafted in secrecy, the bill was not subjected to the traditional public hearing process

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SB1149 is also problematic in that it extends to recordings of emergency calls. While there is some precedent for restricting access to gruesome photos and video after a tragedy, this is far more limited with respect to audio recordings.

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This aspect of the law in particular may have grave consequences for the future of the state’s transparency. Records of emergency calls traditionally become public records and are used by the media and ordinary citizens alike to evaluate law enforcement and their response to emergencies. The condition of the victim is an essential element of evaluating law enforcement response. As the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sonny Albarado, noted, “If you hide away documents from the public, then the public has no way of knowing whether police…have done their jobs correctly.” In other words, these calls serve as an essential check on government.

[NeimanLab]

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