Having already discussed his unspeakably vile “Jungle Fever” smear on Sarah Palin, now we learn — via Ace of Spades — that McGinniss expended considerable effort pursuing a story that depicted her father Chuck Heath as having created “a lynch mob mentality.”
Rob Port at Say Anything was contacted by McGinniss because Port’s father was an Alaska State Trooper involved in the investigation of a case where a school teacher molested several girls. The school board fired the principal of the school for failing to take action after receiving accusations against the teacher. Chuck Heath, himself a teacher and evidently a friend of the principal, felt that the principal got a raw deal and protested against the career-destroying termination.
When Rob Port declined to discuss the case (Rob’s father remains good friends with Chuck Heath and the Palin family) McGinniss then forwarded to Rob someone else’s e-mail account of the controversy that including the “lynch mob” accusation, as well as the claim that “Chuck Heath resorted to violence — death threats, veiled threats, verbal violence, the complete disregard for the welfare of the affected children — against board members (women only) who were trying to protect the children of the district.”
McGinniss then told Port that, unless his father was willing to give his side of the story, he would “have to pay attention” to that “version of events.” (Rob has posted the e-mail exchange in PDF form.)
Now, what McGinniss is doing here is a familiar reporting trick, using information gathered from one source as leverage to get further information from another source. But the way he’s going about is reckless and irresponsible. By transmitting a lengthy written account of this story from someone he says was “deeply involved” in the controversy, McGinniss risks exposing his source’s identity. He further runs the risk of a defamation accusation, by transmitting to a third party an accusation against Chuck Heath made to him by his original source.
McGinniss’s publisher will certainly have a lawyer go over his manuscript to ensure that it doesn’t put the publisher at risk of a libel claim. But I guaran-damn-tee you any competent lawyer would have a screaming fit to know that McGinniss had e-mailed to someone else this “lynch mob” story about Chuck Heath. Such things are not done.
Let me explain with a hypothetical example:
Suppose that someone tells me that Joe McGinniss has a habit of purchasing stray cats at the local animal shelter and then ritually torturing the cats to death. Now, if I want to pursue an article about Cat-Killer McGinniss, I can contact the animal shelter and ask if, indeed, he’s made multiple purchases of stray cats. But if the clerk at the animal shelter asks why I want to know this, I can’t tell the clerk about the allegations that McGinniss has inflicted heinous torture on the poor creatures at the Satanic altar in his basement. Because to repeat such unsubstantiated accusations might put me at risk of a slander suit.
OK, so I go down to the county courthouse and try to look up police reports, to see if maybe Joe McGinniss’s neighbors have filed any nuisance complaints about the pitiful howls of stray cats being hideously mutilated during the midnight coven gatherings where McGinniss and his fellow Servants of Darkness offer their bloody ritual homage to Beelzbub. But if the court clerk asks me why I’m searching the archives, I can’t say, “Oh, just trying to find the documentation of the ghastly crimes committed by Joe McGinniss, the Satanic Cat Torturer.” Again, this would put me at risk of a slander suit.
Perhaps the layman might say to a professional journalist in such a (hypothetical) situation, “Why not just start out by asking McGinniss himself if the accusations are true?” And my answer would be, “Of course, he’d deny it. Satanic cat-killers are all notorious liars.” Besides, asking McGinniss himself would tip him off to the effect that someone had spilled the beans on his cult’s rituals, and he’d orchestrate a cover-up which might involve the brutal murder of anyone suspected of breaking the Servants of Darkness oath of silence.
From this hypothetical example, you see what I’m talking about. By forwarding to Rob Port that e-mail chock-full of potentially actionable defamatory statements about Chuck Heath, Joe McGinniss may have put himself in serious legal jeopardy. Beyond that, McGinniss may have compromised his source’s anonymity. If Chuck Heath is the violent lynch-mob leader the source claims, there’s nothing to stop “Lynch Mob Chuck” from putting two and two together, figuring out who this “deeply involved” source is, and then leading his posse of Wasilla thugs on a rampage of violent vengeance against the source.
Rob Port doesn’t seem to get the wild recklessness of McGinniss’s actions in this instance. Instead, Rob reaches a more mundane conclusion: “The moral of the story, though, is that McGinnis is a slime ball.”
And I wouldn’t trust him around cats. IYKWIMAITYD.
