"When
Texas cattlemen first sought to punish Oprah Winfrey for airing
a show about mad cow disease in 1996, the Texas attorney general
declined to file suit on their behalf because, he was quoted as
saying, it would only draw further attention to the show's "outrageous
claims" about the meat supply. Though this piece of eminent good
sense didn't convince the cattlemen, several of whom went ahead
and sued Ms.Winfrey themselves, you might have thought that their
decisive trouncing in federal court last month would pound in
the message. No such luck.
Not
only have the cattlemen appealed in federal court; last week they
assembled a slightly different group of 130 plaintiffs and filed
virtually the same suit again in state court, charging, as before,
that the broadcast drove down beef prices and lost the industry
millions of dollars. If there are still three or four people in
the nation who haven't heard about Humane Society activist Howard
Lyman's speculations about how mad cow disease might spread through
U.S. beef stocks, and Ms.Winfrey's sympathetic exclamation that
she had eaten her last hamburger, their state of ignorance is
unlikely to outlast yet another round of argument over Ms.Winfrey's
right to broadcast discussions of food safety.
Like
the first case, this one invokes Texas's ill-advised agricultural
defamation law, perhaps on the assumption that a state court in
a heavily beef-industry town will treat a state law more tenderly
than did federal judge Mary Lou Robinson, who promptly declared
it irrelevant to the case.
But
there's far more wrong with the "veggie defamation" laws than
their apparent weakness when applied to a case like the Winfrey
one -- in which doubt was cast on even the threshold issue of
whether beef on the hoof counts as a protected "perishable food
product." Passed in 13 states under pressure from agricultural
producers weary of sometimes alarmist discussion of food-borne
disease, the laws drastically lower free-speech protections; some
would even punish claims that a speaker believes to be true. Retrying
the Winfrey case under this wrongheaded law reopens the possibility
that it will be overturned as unconstitutional. That would be
a fitting backfire to what looks more like simple bullying."
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