My old pal Andy Van De Voorde is back. Village Voice Media, which owns the SF Weekly and is now pleading poverty, managed to fly Van De Voorde and the two top comany executives, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, in to San Francisco for the hearing Friday on our lawsuit. And Van De Voorde, writing as The Snitch, has put forward a remarkable work of journalistic whining.
Oh, dear, says Andy; Judge Marla Miller is prepared to accept the jury’s verdict after a five-week trial and follow the law by issuing an injunction. Requiring the Weekly to follow the law would violate the First Amendment.
There are a couple of key points that he misses.
One is that courts have found consistently over the years that newspapers, despite their First Amendment protections, are also businesses — in some cases, big businesses — and have to follow the same sorts of basic regulations as all other businesses. It costs money to comply with OSHA rules, the National Labor Relations Act, and environmental laws. It’s costing the Guardian (and, I assume, the Weekly) a bit of cash to comply with the city’s new health-insurance law. Should those laws be invalidated because complying with them means I as an editor have less money to spend on reporters and freelancers?
Be serious.
The other point that he misses is that the Unfair Practices Act, the Progressive Era law designed to keep small business from being destroyed by giant predatory competitors, actually promotes the goals of the First Amendment, which, history tells us, include the notion that a broad variety of voices in the marketplace of ideas make for a healthy democracy.
Preventing one large media company from driving a locally owned competitor out of business is a positive result.
See, the Weekly can whine about the First Amendment all it wants, but a jury found that the 16-paper chain, with revenues of some $150 million a year, that owns the Weekly, was trying to silence a First Amendment-protected local San Francisco voice. The Weekly wanted to shut us down, in part because the owners of the chain don’t like what we have to say and the way we say it.
Um, Andy, isn’t there a First Amendment issue there?
If the Weekly now wants to whine about the size of the verdict, let me say for the record that we have warned these folks repeatedly, going back more than five years, that they were violating the law. When we first sent a warning letter, we asked for no damages at all; all we wanted was for the predatory activity to cease. We filed suit only because we had no other choice — and even after years of litigation, the jury found that the below-cost selling continued, up to the moment of the verdict.
And now we have no choice but to ask for an injunction, to do what we tried to do from the start: Make these guys follow the law.
Now the Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, have resorted to trying to overturn the Unfair Practices Act and complain about their First Amendment Rights.
Boys: As my late grandfather, the Honorable James C. O’Brien, a New York State Supreme Court judge, used to say, you made your bed — now eat it.
