Defamation suits are generally a bad idea. Absent some highly particularized circumstances, people who are in the public eye are really better off not going to the courts to seek redemption for their tarnished reputations. A lawsuit by birthers against Esquire magazine is a good example of this. The World Net Daily birther types will only hang a lantern on their own willful blindness to reality by claiming they were wrongly mocked for their eminently mockable beliefs and public statements furthering them.
There’s so much to criticize about President Obama. Seriously, trying to claim intellectual respectability for birtherism at this stage of the game is lighting on fire whatever political credibility you might still have.
Private parties, that’s a different story. But public figures, people dealing with public issues, celebrities — the Constitutional bar to recovery is so high, and the chances of attracting more negative publicity so great, that silence should be the default response of anyone with even “C” list levels of publicity to a public criticism.
In the WND, though, it seems like a win/win strategy. If they are successful in the suit (*snort*), they… well, they win.
If the courts find against them (as they surely will), then it becomes proof of the corrupt system that is out to get WND, which will increase visibility and traffic and market share for those that eat those things for breakfast, and thus they win.
Consider the perspective of a (theoretical) neutral person assessing their credibility for the first time. Would their winning or losing a lawsuit in which truth was one of the issues matter to you? I submit it would for most reasonable people and thus that the platform of proving the truth of what has been said that a defamation claim serves up on a silver platter to their adversaries is probably in most cases a tactical mistake.
for most reasonable people
Well, there’s your flawed premise right there for Joseph Farah and his band of Merry Men.