Opinion ID: 662398
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Sloppy Journalism

Text: 41 As we held in White, even a per se opinion is actionable if it can reasonably be understood as implying provable facts. 909 F.2d at 522. Thus, if the Times review had said nothing more than Moldea's work is sloppy journalism, this statement would be actionable because it is capable of defamatory meaning, and it reasonably can be understood to rest on provable, albeit unstated, defamatory facts. In levying the charge of sloppy journalism, it is inescapable that Eskenazi implies certain facts--that Moldea plays fast and loose with his sources, that his allegations are not to be believed. Everyone who reads the charge will generally agree on its import. 42 It is true that whether a book is sloppy, and indeed whether there is too much sloppiness, as Eskenazi stated in his review, may involve an element of subjective evaluation. However, whether an epithet represents a reviewer's opinion simply is not dispositive of the question before us. A bare assertion that Moldea is a practitioner of sloppy journalism would be precisely analogous to the Supreme Court's example in Milkovich: In my opinion John Jones is a liar. 497 U.S. at 18, 110 S.Ct. at 2705. Although sloppy in a vacuum may be difficult to quantify, the term has obvious, measurable aspects when applied to the field of investigative journalism. (Similarly, an accusation of clumsy hands may be amorphous in and of itself, but reasonable listeners would agree as to its implications when applied to a brain surgeon). 6 Given that it is defamatory publicly to disparage a person's competence in his chosen field, it simply cannot be the case that a writer may attack a person's work with impunity, and without substantiating his charges with facts, merely by using arguably imprecise terms. 43 Further, we think it important to make clear that, under the established case law, our analysis of this case is not altered by the fact that the challenged statements appeared [304 U.S.App.D.C. 415] in a book review rather than in a hard news story. To permit a defendant to escape liability for libel merely because defamatory remarks are published in a book review would be as simplistic as permitting an author to insulate himself or herself by merely prefacing assertions with the words I think ... and calling everything that followed nonactionable opinion. In other words, it would make little sense to craft a rule that permitted otherwise libelous statements to go unchecked so long as they appeared in certain sacrosanct genres. In the instant case, the injury to Moldea's professional reputation is if anything greater because Eskenazi's review appeared in a forum to which readers turn for evaluations of books. For an author, a harsh review in The New York Times Book Review is at least as damaging as accusations of incompetence made against an attorney or a surgeon in a legal or medical journal. 44 It has been suggested that, in reviews as a genre, the object of the judgment is available to the critic's audience. Mr. Chow of New York v. Ste. Jour Azur S.A., 759 F.2d 219, 228 (2d Cir.1985). This statement, which suggests some type of doctrinal exemption for reviews generally, implies that the statements of opinion in reviews are, by definition, based on revealed premises. Obviously, this cannot be: readers use reviews to decide whether to look at/eat/explore the underlying object of the review. That the object itself is identified in the review is not enough. More than in other contexts, the reviewer's assessment may actually influence behavior. 45 We certainly do not mean to suggest that all bad reviews are actionable. We do hold, however, that assertions that would otherwise be actionable in defamation are not transmogrified into nonactionable statements when they appear in the context of a book review. This conclusion finds strong support in the Supreme Court's decision in Milkovich. The statements held actionable in that case appeared in an opinion column in a newspaper sports section, a forum well known for spirited expressions of personal opinion, but this fact played no part in the Court's analysis. See Milkovich, 497 U.S. at 9, 110 S.Ct. at 2700 (noting that court below had relied on this fact in determining that article at issue was nonactionable because it was opinion). As explained above, Milkovich held that statements which are hyperbolic, satirical, or otherwise marked as evaluations not meant to be taken literally are nonactionable only when they meet the criteria established by the Supreme Court specifically addressing such portrayals. 46 To assert that Interference is sloppy necessarily implies that Eskenazi concluded that it is sloppy because of specific shortcomings he found in the book. In order for the review to be nonactionable as a matter of law, the Times must show that it offered true facts in support of its judgment that served to support its statement of opinion. 47