From Blankenship v. NBCUniversal, LLC (4th Cir.), decided Wednesday by Chief Judge Roger Gregory, Judge Paul Niemeyer, and District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles (E.D. Va.):
Following an unsuccessful campaign for one of West Virginia's U.S. Senate seats, Don Blankenship sued numerous media organizations and individual journalists [including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, the Washington Post, and more], alleging defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and civil conspiracy. Blankenship's claims arise from misstatements of his criminal record: he was convicted and served one year in prison for a federal conspiracy offense that is classified as a misdemeanor, but Defendants made statements describing him as a "felon." …
At the outset, Defendants argue that we can affirm the district court's decisions [in favor of defendants] on the alternative ground that none of the challenged statements were actionably false. The district court, of course, reached the opposite conclusion. But Defendants contend that a "felony" is often understood to refer colloquially to serious crimes, and that there is no question Blankenship's conviction and sentence were serious. Here, we will simply assume that Defendants' statements satisfy the falsity element because we can instead resolve Blankenship's claims based on the actual malice element….
