Joe Sharkey vs. Brazil
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Posted
by Benet Wilson at
9/29/2009 6:08 AM CDT
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New York Times aviation contributor Joe Sharkey has become the latest target of the Brazilian government over his reporting after the Sept. 29 2006 midair collision of a Gol Boeing 737 and an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet, according to the latest issue of Editor & Publisher, a trade publication for journalists.
In his E&P story, Sharkey said he was served with the lawsuit at his home last week for what he wrote – in the United States – about his experience in the collision. His experience is a new term coined “libel tourism,” where “a foreign national claiming to be offended by something written in the United States travels to a pliant court in another country and obtains a libel judgment against the American defendant, even though the allegedly offensive speech would be fully protected under the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote.
But Sharkey says that in his case, brought by a Brazilian citizen who is the widow of one of the 154 passengers killed on the Gol flight, wasn’t mentioned in any of his writings. “I had never heard of her till the suit was filed,” he wrote in E&P.
The plaintiff “feels discriminated against” by Sharkey’s defense of the American pilots flying the Embraer Legacy in media interviews after he returned from Brazil. Specifically, the lawsuit targets Sharkey’s personal blog – High Anxiety – and not the NY Times. But the suit, among other things, is demanding that he offer apologies in the Times and all the TV and radio outlets that interviewed him after the crash, according to E&P.
Sharkey noted that he’s the only person involved in the crash that is still free to speak, and he defended the pilots, saying they “were clearly being scapegoated in an intensely anti-American atmosphere in the Brazilian media and public arena.” That touched off a wave of denunciations in Brazil from the country’s defense minister and others, leading to hate mail and death threats, he said.
In the Dec. 15 issue (subscribers only) of The Weekly of Business Aviation, managing editor Kerry Lynch wrote that the National Transportation Safety Board and the Brazilian Aeronautical Accident Investigation and Prevention Center presented sharply differing views of the events that led to the midair collision, with the Brazilian agency continuing to point to the ExcelAire crew piloting the Legacy and the U.S. investigators citing Brazil’s air traffic control system.
NTSB said it had “no substantial disagreement with the facts gathered” in the Brazilian accident report and generally agrees that the safety issues involved in the accident are related to ATC, operational factors, and the loss of in-flight collision avoidance technology. “However, the interpretations, conclusions and understandings of the relationship between certain factual items and the demonstrated risk differ in a number of ways,” the safety board said.
Sharkey says that “libel tourism” is a serious threat against free speech in America. “If Brazil can claim a ruinous judgment in the U.S. against an American citizen who has `offended’ that nation, what is to stop any other country – Iran? Libya? North Korea? – from trying the same tactic?,” he asked. “And it could be directed not just against a journalist or blogger, but also an academic, a researcher, an analyst, an entertainer, a casual traveler who writes something that is deemed insufficiently respectful.”
The Free Speech Protection Act of 2009 – H.R. 1304 – was introduced by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) on March 4, but it appears to be stalled in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy. The state of New York has laws that prohibit enforcement of foreign judgments against citizens sued for defamation, in cases involving speech that would be protected in the U.S., said Sharkey, but his home state of New Jersey does not have similar legislation in place.
Defenders of business aviation in general and free speech in particular need to come out in defense of Sharkey, a respected journalist who happened to be a part of a major story. If this lawsuit is allowed to go forward, it could cause a chilling effect on the rights of reporters to report the news, good or bad.
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Here's an Economist story from January on the U.K. situation http://tinyurl.com/a8ns29