An excerpt from yesterday's 24K-word Delaware Supreme Court decision in Mac Isaac v. Politico LLC, written by Justice Gary Traynor:
This is an appeal from a Superior Court opinion and order that dismissed a computer-repair-shop owner's defamation claims against a customer, various news outlets, and a political campaign committee, as well as counterclaims brought by the customer against the shop owner. For the reasons that follow, we have concluded that the Superior Court did not err when it held that the allegedly defamatory statements did not concern the plaintiff shop owner and thus were not actionable….
In the Superior Court, Mac Isaac conceded that the October 19 Politico article was "substantially true," but argued that its headline, which stated that the "Hunter Biden story IS Russian disinformation," was false and defamatory. This decoupling of the headline from the substance of the article was consistent with Mac Isaac's complaint, in which he highlighted that "[s]tudies have shown that many readers browse headlines and do not read the actual underlying article." ….
[But] the article's headline, which is the only part of the publication identified by Mac Isaac as false and defamatory, does not mention Mac Isaac or provide any information from which a reader might think that Mac Isaac was a participant in a "Russian information operation." And the only statement in the article below the headline "of and concerning" Mac Isaac was that he initiated the chain of events that led to the laptop landing in the hands of Rudy Guiliani. That statement was true, and Mac Isaac concedes as much…. No matter how often Mac Isaac claims that the Politico headline "implicated him as being part of a Russian disinformation operation," the text of the headline is not reasonably read in that fashion. To the extent that the headline and the article together concerned Mac Isaac at all, it did so in an accurate and nondefamatory way.
