SLAPP Happy: Corporations That Sue to Shut You Up

“Thousands of
SLAPPs have been filed in the last two decades, tens of thousands of Americans
have been SLAPPed, and still more have been muted or silenced by the
threat,” write law professors George Pring and Penelope Canan in their
1996 book, SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out.

In their
investigation of the trend, Pring and Canan found that “filers of SLAPPs
rarely win in court yet often 'win' in the real world, achieving their
political agendas. We found that SLAPP targets who fight back seldom lose in
court yet are frequently devastated and depoliticized and discourage others
from speaking out – 'chilled' in the parlance of First Amendment
commentary.”

“Initially we
saw such suits as attacks on traditional 'free speech' and regarded them as
just 'intimidation lawsuits,' ” Pring and Canan state. “As we studied
them further, an even more significant linkage emerged: the defendants had been
speaking out in government hearings, to government officials, or about
government actions…. This was not just free speech under attack. It was
that other and older and even more central part of our Constitution: the right
to petition government for a redress of grievances, the 'Petition Clause' of
the First Amendment.”

SLAPP suits threaten
the very foundation of citizen involvement and public participation in
democracy.   Corporate libel
lawsuits bring the formidable powers of government and industry together for
the purpose of suppressing the views of people with complaints against the
system.



Ironically, the PR industry is eagerly hyping these lawsuits as
populist solutions to the problem of too much government.


(click here to read the entire article)

Taking back the media from corporate control and infusing it with the voice of the people.

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