Actual malice

A California appellate court upheld the dismissal of a libel suit brought by the head of a small startup tech company against the Internet blogging company Gawker Media.

A Virginia trial court threw out a $3 million libel verdict against a local newspaper, finding that a local school official failed to show that the allegedly defamatory article was published with actual malice.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a defamation suit over online accusations of child sexual abuse could still proceed, even though the plaintiff could not show he was harmed.

The decision upheld a 2010 appeals court ruling that New Jersey First Amendment attorneys hoped would lead to a change in the law by the state's Supreme Court.

A Florida judge has dismissed a former U.S. Senate candidate's libel suit against the St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald.

An Iowa jury awarded a state senator $231,000 in a defamation suit last week, finding that his opponent and the local Democratic Party defamed him in a TV ad that ran during the 2010 senate race.

State Sen. Rick Bertrand, a Republican, filed the suit with the Woodbury County District Court within 48 hours after the campaign ad aired claiming that Bertrand “put profit over children’s health,” according to the senator. The ad was paid for by the Iowa Democratic Party and approved by his opponent Rick Mullin, who would eventually lose the election to Bertrand.

A front-page teaser that wrongly stated that the subjects of a civil complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission were "arrested" was not made with "actual malice" -- intentional falsity or reckless disregard for the truth -- the New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled.

The decision means that the The Nutley Sun and its parent company, the North Jersey Media Group, are not liable to the plaintiffs in the false light case filed against them.

A former candidate for the Maine State Senate could not show that negative advertisements about him by an out-of-state Republican organization, unaffiliated with his opponent, contained false statements that were made intentionally or with reckless disregard for their falsity, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston (1st Cir.) ruled earlier this month.

Earlier this week the Georgia Supreme Court declined to review a lower court decision in the long-running libel case against The Atlanta Journal-Constitution filed by Richard Jewell, who was wrongfully accused of the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, and carried on by his family since his death in 2007.

Two sugar-cane plantation owners from the Dominican Republic must satisfy a higher standard reserved for public figures if they are to prevail in a libel suit against American filmmakers who made a documentary critical of the Caribbean nation's sugar industry, a federal court of appeals has ruled.

In what may be the largest defamation verdict in Minnesota history, a jury found that a Minneapolis TV news station acted with "constitutional malice" and awarded a naturopathic healer $1 million.

The jury found that the ABC news affiliate, KSTP, acted with reckless disregard for the truth when it ran a report more than two years ago about healer Susan Anderson and advice she allegedly gave her client, Cheryl Blaha.