Daily Sentinel Publisher Jay Seaton has decided against suing Sen. Ray Scott for calling them fake news because a Syrian dictator is killing his own citizens with chemical weapons.
Or something like that, Seaton explains in a long rambling editorial under the thoughtful headline of “Hey, Seaton, where’s that lawsuit you threatened?”
What it appears to boil down to, is that the media is hyper-sensitive about having its credibility questioned in this information age when more people are tuning in to Facebook and other websites for news, and actual news businesses are going out of business.
We get that.
It’s tough to watch newspaper after newspaper fold across the country and worry about whether yours is next. The industry has been in a spiraling slump for a decade, with no signs that print will survive.
On top of that, readers are turning away because they are tired of blatant bias, and politicians have capitalized on that by labeling some stories as fake news, and some of those stories are certainly questionable.
But allow us to offer a little advice. The news business has been under attack by politicians, readers, and from each other, since the dawn of its time and those in the business have thick skins because of it.
There was a time when reporters wore it as a badge of honor if politicians wrote nasty letters about them or threatened to sue because of something they wrote exposing wrongdoing.
That a newspaper publisher would threaten to sue a politician for defamation seems extremely thin-skinned to us and a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to economics.
But now Seaton has taken a deep breath, and for many numerous reasons and excuses, has decided not to move forward and we applaud him for that.
Now maybe he can focus on updating and improving the paper’s website, one of our favorites, and making it more readable on mobile devices. Get with the times, bro.