Here’s a quick review of how we got to the lawsuit against the Plain Dealer and affiliated companies. In late March, a Cleveland.com reader with the username “lawmiss” posted a comment on the site about a relative of a Plain Dealer reporter. A website editor was curious about the post, and decided to figure out who was behind the comment. Using internal software, he obtained the email address, and linked it to Judge Saffold. He then looked at all the other comments made by “lawmiss”. Of the roughly 80 comments, some were innocuous, but others were directly about cases Judge Saffold is presiding over, including comments about the lawyer representing Anthony Sowell. Judges are not allowed to comment on their ongoing cases.
Judge Saffold says the AOL email address tied to the lawmiss online handle was a family account, and that her daughter Sydney was actually responsible for the posts about the ongoing cases. She’s refused to recuse herself from the Sowell case or any others, and is now seeking damages from the Plain Dealer and the affiliated companies that run Cleveland.com.
SPITZ: The case is very simply about promises and contractual promises.
Saffold isn’t commenting on the case, but her lawyer Brian Spitz is. He doesn’t deny that some of the lawmiss comments were made by Saffold herself, just not the ones pertaining to her cases. In the suit, Saffold and her daughter allege Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer violated their own privacy policy by uncovering lawmiss’s identity and publishing it in the paper.
SPITZ: Either the Plain Dealer breached its promise to keep that information confidential, or it never intended to keep it confidential. So it’s either a breach of contract or fraud.
Now that it’s a legal matter, Plain Dealer editor Susan Goldberg isn’t commenting on the case. But she told WNYC’s On the Media last week that Cleveland.com’s privacy policy doesn’t actually guarantee that much privacy.
GOLDBERG: It says that we’ll sell your name. It says we can use information for any legitimate business purpose. And it says if the police ask who you are, we can turn over that information.
It’s that part about using the information for any legitimate business purpose that’s likely to be key if this case goes to trial. The policy, as written, gives examples of business uses: things like diagnosing technical problems on the site. While it’s not limited to that, it doesn’t mention journalism, says Case Western Reserve University law professor Jackie Lipton.
LIPTON: So it may be that a judge would look at that language and say you have to interpret business purposes as between the subscriber and the newspaper, and not in terms of the newspaper’s everyday business.
For the Plain Dealer, and other news organizations, the case raises new questions about supposedly anonymous online comments on news articles. Kelly McBride runs the Ethics Group at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.
McBRIDE: This is a huge issue in newsrooms. Anonymous postings, negative postings, postings that are libelous, that are harmful to the community, postings that incite hatred.
McBride says many news organizations opened the doors to these kinds of anonymous comments without first thinking through the potential ramifications.
McBRIDE: Newsrooms all over the place are reconsidering how they allow citizens to be involved in the news—and that includes commentary and other submissions. I don’t think many newsrooms will get rid of comments.
As for the Judge Saffold, many have called for her to step aside from the cases she or her daughter may have commented on—such as the Sowell case. So far, she’s refused, and her lawyer says they can’t comment on whether she might in the future.
But Case Western’s Lipton says no matter the merits of the case against the Plain Dealer, Judge Saffold should recuse herself because it looks bad.
LIPTON: If it’s true that she was sharing an internet account with her daughter, you probably shouldn’t be sharing an account where public comments can be made about these kinds of matters. You probably should have some idea what your family members are doing with that account.