Rod Dreher on a suit that’s hit the blogosphere.

I had a little libel run-in myself, once. Seems to me one big difference between big media and blogs — and Instapundit touched upon it a little – is that big media can afford libel insurance, and most can afford to have libel lawyers on retainer. We wee bloggers don’t have that luxury.

Consequently, the mere threat of a lawsuit can have the effect of prior restraint. Even if we’re 100% confident in what we want to publish — and we’re sure we’d win at a trial — the mere threat of a suit can prevent publication because most of us don’t have the finanical wherewithall to afford legal representation. That’s pretty much what happened to me, and why the Straight piece I wrote for Reason still sits in an e-file.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 16th, 2002 at 1:10 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.