Court Opinion

ID: 9850429
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:57:05.608656+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:37.011914
License: Public Domain

KELLEY, Justice
(dissenting).
A majority of this court recently held that a commercial media defendant, who the jury found had done a “hatchet job” with constitutional malice on a public official through distortion and/or omission of established facts and through unwarranted inference, was immune from tort liability, unlike the rest of the citizens of this state, corporate or private, who would undoubtedly be liable in tort for that type of conduct. I joined the dissent of Justice Yetka in that case. Diesen v. Hessburg, 455 N.W.2d 446 (Minn.1990) (Petition to withdraw pending). In my opinion, the majority today, applying a somewhat different analysis, affords to that same commercial media immunity from liability from an unmistakable breach of contract, although any other corporate or private citizen of this state under similar circumstances would most certainly have been liable in damages for breach of contract.
While I agree with the majority that the trial court erred in not granting the defendants’ post-trial motions for judgment notwithstanding the verdict on the misrepresentation claim, I remain unpersuaded by the majority’s analysis that, notwithstanding that all of the elements of a legal contract and its breach are here present, the contract is unenforceable because “the parties intended none.” It reaches this conclusion even as it concedes that the promises given by the agents and employees of these defendants was intended by them to be kept. Majority Op. at-. *207Rather than affording Cohen a remedy for the considerable damage he sustained, see Art. I, § 8, Constitution of Minnesota, the majority, it seems to me, engaged in or came very close to engaging in some inappropriate appellate fact finding, to-wit, that each of the parties did not intend a contract and assumed the risk “of what might happen.” I conclude that the analysis employed by Judge Short in the majority opinion of the court of appeals, Cohen v. Cowles Media Co., 445 N.W.2d 248 (Minn.App.1989), correctly sets forth the applicable contract law governing the transaction between Cohen and employees and agents of these media defendants. Therefore, I adopt it as my dissent here. I likewise join the dissent of Justice Yetka which highlights the perfidy of these defendants, the liability for which they now seek to escape by trying to crawl under the aegis of the First Amendment, which, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the case.1 Today’s decision serves to inhibit rather than to promote the objectives of the First Amendment by “drying up” potential sources of information on public matters. I dissent.

. These media defendants now advance a First Amendment argument based upon the "public’s right to know." I suggest to do so is indeed ironical when considered in the light of the extensive efforts of each to promote enactment of Minnesota Statutes Sections 595.021 to 595.-025, the Minnesota Free Flow of Information Act, sometimes popularly referred to as the Reporter’s Shield Act. This statute protects the news media from compelled disclosure of sources in court and other proceedings. Ralph Bailey, editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, urged passage of a similar companion bill before the Judicial Administration Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 30, 1973, as did an attorney-lobbyist for the St. Paul and Duluth newspapers. That same attorney-lobbyist and John Finnegan, Executive Editor, St. Paul Dispatch, appeared and testified at a meeting of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives on March 1, 1973, and again later on March 14, 1973. Both participated in discussion of amendments to the proposed bill (House File 624), which ultimately was passed and is now codified as Minnesota Statutes Sections 595.021 — 595.025. Although minimal amendments to these statutes were made in 1981, 1983, and 1986, they did not change the basic substance of the statute. Thus, the Minnesota Free Flow of Information Act, when combined with today’s decision, with few tightly circumscribed exceptions, leaves the “public's right to know and protection of confidential sources,” not with the peoples’ representatives— the legislature and the courts — but rather with the executives of the commercial media.