Court Opinion

ID: 9729724
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:47:31.391034+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:00.772961
License: Public Domain

Kass, J.
(dissenting). I respectfully dissent. My quarrel is not with the authorities cited or the principles to be learned from those authorities. I part company with my *682brethren in the application of those principles to the facts before us. In context, I do not see how any reasonable reader could take the purportedly offending sentence as a statement of fact. Greenbelt Coop. Publishing Assn. v. Bresler, 398 U.S. 6, 14 (1970).
The context of the text is criticism, a compendium of what the magazine considered best and worst in a variety of settings in the Boston scene. Criticism, an expression of opinion, is not defamatory. Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 339-340 (1974). Steak Bit of Westbury, Inc. v. Newsday, Inc., 70 Misc. 2d 437, 438 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1972) ("On the whole I thought it was a pretty unappetizing group of eating places. It was mostly all fake food, ground-up schmutz”).
As the majority has observed, the defendant in the case before us tossed garlands and nettles to the best and the worst in a variety of categories. In the category of sports the magazine cited the best and worst: sports announcer, sexy athlete, sports move of the year, local sports book, locker, local ski slopes, pick-up basketball game, and sports groupie. The very subjects bespeak levity and tongue in cheek. The entire text, i.e. the complete expression of the critic’s view under the subcategory of worst sports announcer, after identifying the unfortunate winner, consists of one sentence: "The only newscaster in town who is enrolled in a course for remedial speaking.” Can one sensibly read this as other than an ironic style of expressing the magazine’s opinion or as hyperbole? I do not think so. The next subcategory, sexy athlete, carries on in the same vein. Giving the award to the Bruins, the magazine says: "You’d look like a gargoyle, too, if you’d spent a lifetime fielding pucks with your face.” Is this, too, a statement of fact? The art work which adorns the text is in a similarly comic vein. Taking into account this background, I think the majority’s reading of the text is the type of close analysis which we said in Borski v. Kochanowski, 3 Mass. App. Ct. 269, 271 (1975), "is hardly a realistic indication of how this publication would be read ....”
*683That the plaintiff is a public figure, a television sports announcer, makes him particularly fair game for the barbs of the critic. Solomone v. MacMillan Publishing Co., 411 N.Y.S.2d 105 110 (Sup. Ct. 1978).
I prefer that the pen of the satirist not be blunted by the blue pencil of the libel lawyer and would affirm the judgment below.