(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
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Appeals court rules in favor of Iowa newspaper in defamation case [1]
['Clark Kauffman', 'More From Author', '- January']
Date: 2024-01-24
The Iowa Courts of Appeals has let stand a judge’s dismissal of a defamation lawsuit brought by the former city administrator of Davenport.
The former administrator, Craig Malin, sued the Iowa-based newspaper company Lee Enterprises and its Davenport paper, the Quad-City Times, alleging that two of its writers had published articles in 2014 and 2015 that libeled him and intentionally interfered with his employment contract with the city.
The district court granted Lee Enterprises summary judgment on the issue of libel, dismissing the claim without a trial. The contractual interference claim, however, proceeded to a jury trial where the jury ruled in favor of Lee and the Times.
Malin appealed that decision, after which an appeals court panel affirmed the verdict.
In 2019, however, while the court proceedings involving the Quad-City Times were ongoing, two other Lee publications, the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, printed editorials on the litigation under the heading “Opinion.”
The editorials, one of which was entitled “Lawsuit threatens to put a chill on aggressive reporting that exposes wrongdoing,” stated that the Times had published “a series of damning reports in 2015 exposing involvement by Malin and Davenport’s former city attorney in the advancement of taxpayer-funded groundwork for a future casino project.”
Malin then sued Lee Enterprises, along with the Waterloo and St. Louis newspapers, for defamation, invasion of privacy, unjust enrichment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent hiring, training, and supervision. The district court eventually granted the defendants’ request for summary judgment in the case, triggering an appeal by Malin.
On Wednesday, the Iowa Courts of Appeals upheld the district court’s decision without addressing Malin’s constitutional claim, stating that particular claim had not been preserved because Malin never developed the argument in court.
In ruling against Malin, the appeals court said all of Malin’s claims were “rooted in and inextricably intertwined with” his defamation claim. The court noted that the Waterloo and St. Louis pieces were specifically presented to the public as editorials, not as news articles.
As for Malin’s complaint that the publications inaccurately described the groundwork for the casino project as “taxpayer-funded,” the court found that “the gist of the publications’ statements on that point were true because the casino development was to be funded by bonds that would be repaid by tax revenue” generated by the project.
Malin said Wednesday he plans to appeal the Iowa Court of Appeals’ decision specifically with regard to the finding that he had not preserved his constitutional claim.
Lee Enterprises newspapers are among dozens of media outlets that republish content from Iowa Capital Dispatch under a Creative Commons license. Clark Kauffman and Capital Dispatch Editor Kathie Obradovich were Lee Enterprises employees in the 1980s and ’90s.
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