Texas officials sue Dallas weekly over satirical article

By The Associated Press,
freedomforum.org staff

12.03.99

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DENTON, Texas — A weekly Dallas newspaper is being sued for a satirical article that two elected Denton County officials allege has defamed them.

The Dallas Observer's Nov. 11 edition included an article by Rose Farley that attributed fictitious quotes to District Attorney Bruce Isaacks and Juvenile Judge Darlene Whitten, but was not clearly labeled as satire and was published in an area of the Observer usually reserved for news stories, the lawsuit alleges.

The article was identified as a parody in subsequent editions of the newspaper.

The story was a takeoff on a real story about a Ponder boy who was jailed for nearly a week after writing a Halloween story in which he shoots his teacher and other students. Whitten ordered 13-year-old Christopher Beamon jailed. Isaacks ultimately dropped the case and the youth was released.

The Observer story had a fictitious section about a 6-year-old Ponder girl jailed for writing a report on the children's book Where the Wild Things Are.

It contained quotations from the judge, who according to the story, ordered the girl's detention, and from Isaacks, who was quoted as saying officials were trying to decide whether to file charges against her.

The fictitious quote from Whitten read: "Any implication of violence in a school situation, even if it was just contained in a first-grader's book report, is reason enough for panic and overreaction."

The fictitious story quoted Isaacks as saying, "We've considered having her certified to stand trial as an adult, but even in Texas there are some limits."

A Dallas radio station and the student newspaper at the University of North Texas reported the story to be true.

"As a direct result of this story, there has been harm to my reputation," Isaacks said.

Mike Whitten, Judge Whitten's husband and attorney, said he asked the Observer for a retraction. He said that when the newspaper refused a sincere retraction, he sued on Nov. 30 on behalf of his wife and Isaacks, who are seeking unspecified damages.

Observer editor Julie Lyons acknowledged the newspaper had received correspondence from readers who believed the article was true, but said the weekly would fight the lawsuit on the grounds that any reasonable reader "would have known the story was not true."

On Dec. 1, The Dallas Morning News reported that the issue of the fictitious story was covered in the Observer's Nov. 18 Buzz column:

"Here's a clue for our cerebrally-challenged readers who thought the story was real: It wasn't. It was a joke. We made it up. Not even Judge Whitten, we hope, would throw a 6-year-old girl in the slammer for writing a book report. Not yet, anyway."

Whitten told the Morning News that the statement was neither an apology nor a sincere retraction.

Farley's article was "a legitimate editorial on an actual news event. It is not libelous," Lyons said.

Sandra Baron, executive director of the New York-based Libel Defense Resource Center, said that true satire should receive First Amendment protection.

"Satire is generally protected from libel suits," she told freedomforum.org, but it is protected in large part because of the basic maxim that one can only sue for libel for provably false statements of fact.

"So if a statement is not reasonably understood to be a statement of fact, then you cannot sue," she said. "Libel law looks at what the reasonable reader would understand, and a court often decides what a reasonable reader would conclude about a statement."

She said that one factor a court would consider is the location of the satirical article. "For example, it is far less likely, though not always true, that a defamation suit would succeed based on comments on the op-ed page or in an opinion column than in an article located in a place where the reader would expect a hard news story."