In a display of the sense of priorities that have made him essentially the most despised person in the city, Redskins Owner Dan Snyder is suing Washington, D.C.'s local alternative weekly, Washington City Paper, for defamation over their publication of several negative pieces of him, in particular Dave McKenna's "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder." Snyder also managed to wait several months after the article was published to say anything, so his complaint comes at exactly the time that Skins fans are watching the Super Bowl and feeling bitter about the fact that Washington hasn't been to one since the first Bush administration.
A cursory glance suggests that this lawsuit is filed in bad faith and represents nothing more than a wealthy person using economic coercion to censor a public critic. Snyder's complaint begins with this statement:
A tabloid newspaper is not entitled to employ lies, half-truths, innuendo and anti-Semitic imagery to smear, malign, defame and slander a prominent member of the community in order to generate reader interest and maintain its circulation.
Anyone with a passing familiarity in media and libel law knows this isn't true, or Fox News wouldn't exist. First Amendment jurisprudence is particularly protective of the media's ability to criticize public figures, and with good reason. Protection against government censorship only goes so far; to ensure freedom of speech, the speaker must be protected from overt coercion from those with the means to facilitate it.
To prove defamation against a public figure, you have to show that the defendants acted "with reckless disregard for the truth," that essentially a reasonable person would have had little trouble discerning whether or not the claims in question were completely false. As Andrew Beaujon and Erik Wemple have documented, however, the examples in the lawsuit amount to, at best, unfair characterizations.
The lawsuit later refers to an image of Snyder with generic "graffiti" giving him horns and a mustache that accompanied McKenna's article as "precisely the type of imagery used historically, including in Nazi Germany, to dehumanize and vilify the Jewish people and associate them with a litany of libels over the last 2,000 years." Precisely? If Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had deployed this image as propaganda against the Jews, it's possible the Holocaust might never have happened.
Given the almost comical nature of the defamation claims being made, it's hard to see this as anything but an attempt by Snyder to strong-arm the Washington City Paper into retracting the article on its own. The letter sent to their parent companies by his lawyer seems to implicitly confirm this:
Mr. Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation and to defend himself and his wife against your paper's concerted attempt at character assassination. We presume that defending such litigation would not be a rational strategy for an investment fund such as yours. Indeed, the cost of litigation would presumably quickly outstrip the asset value of the Washington City Paper. We presumed that defending such litigation would not be a rational strategy for an investment fund such as yours.
Translation: They know that the lawsuit itself has no chance of succeeding, so they hope that the threat of how much it will cost to litigate will force a retraction.
Washington City Paper has set up a legal defense fund. Snyder, on the other hand, has managed to inflate his dismal stature among ordinary Washingtonians for his poor stewardship of their beloved football team into a national issue, providing an opportunity for the rest of America to dislike him as much as D.C. residents do. In the process, he's also managed to raise the profile of Washington City Paper and turn them into heroes for free speech. Obviously, his spectacular ability to make everything worse applies to more arenas then just professional football.
