TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Paul Burch on Oct 10, 2023

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to consider a bid by a former West Virginia mining company executive to make it easier for public figures to sue news organizations for defamation, Reuters reports. The case would have challenged longstanding protections for media set by the court in 1964. The justices turned away former Massey Energy CEO Donald Blankenship's appeal of a lower court's decision that threw out his defamation lawsuit against major media outlets including Fox News and MSNBC for characterizing him as a "felon" during his unsuccessful 2018 run for the U.S. Senate. Blankenship was convicted in 2015 of a federal conspiracy offense, a misdemeanor, after a 2010 mine explosion that killed 29 coal miners. He had asked the Supreme Court to overturn its landmark ruling, which set stringent limits on defamation claims by public officials under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections for freedom of speech and the press.