Lobbyist's Lawsuit Paints a Skewed 'Times'

The article that The New York Times published in February about the relationship between Sen. John McCain and a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman was, journalistically speaking, kind of a turd: a gussied-up excuse to publish what amounted to a scrap of decade-old political gossip. But the lawsuit it inspired isn't a whole lot more coherent.

Iseman's 36-page, $27 million defamation complaint against the Times, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Virginia, contains, as Michael Calderone notes, a fair bit of media criticism, but it displays a shaky grasp of how a paper like the Times operates. Time and again, Iseman and her lawyers ascribe the actions of Times reporters and editors to sinister motives rather than to the exigencies of deadline journalism or the earnest balancing of competing interests.

One example: The suit notes that the Times attributed some of its information to associates of McCain's "who said they had become disillusioned with the senator." "The asserted disillusionment of the 'associates' underscored the gravity of the misdeeds," claims the suit. Does it? Or is that language an attempt at transparency by the Times -- letting its readers know that some of its sources have axes to grind?

Similarly, on page 31, the suit notes, "The New York Times Defendants were unremitting in their pursuit of Ms. Iseman, presenting her with aggressive e-mail messages which often contained false and misleading factually [sic] suppositions, phone messages, and even messages left on the doorstep of her residence." Isn't this just another way of saying that the reporters worked exhaustively to vet their information and gave her every chance to comment?

The suit even cites the fact that the Times published denials by McCain and Iseman as evidence of the paper's perfidy: "[T]hat The New York Times would make such aggressive and sensational allegations and insinuations in the fact of on-the-record denials by Ms. Iseman and Senator McCain only reinforced the message to readers that The New York Times in fact believed that Ms. Eisman and Senator McCain had engaged in an 'inappropriate relationship.'"

If this case reaches trial, it will likely to turn on questions such as whether a "reasonable person" would infer from the Times article that McCain's relationship with Iseman was sexual, and whether Iseman is a private figure, and thus entitled to more generous legal recourse against defamation. (On this count, at least, she seems to be on solid footing: Nexis has only one citation for her name before February 2008, and that's in a press release, not a news article.) But my layman's guess is that the Times doesn't have much to worry about.

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