OCR Text |
Show There is no place for campaign falsehoods in Park Record ad The 1985 Park City election is over. The voters have made their choice. The winners have accepted congratulations. congratu-lations. One issue may be left, however, and it should be addressed. A few days before the election, the citizens of Park City ' received a communication that said the Park Record had unfairly restricted the exchange of ideas in the campaign debate. The paper, it said, refused to accept an ad critical of some candidates in the campaign. The fact is we did reject the advertisement. It is not a fact that we were unfair in our decision. It would have been unfair to print the ad. It would have been a serious breach of journalistic responsibility to publish statements we knew were not truthful. The word "libel" is tossed around a lot in everyday life. Here's what it means when someone takes you into a court of law. The U.S. Supreme Court gives special protection to the news media in reporting on the actions of public officials and public figures which includes political candidates. To collect damages for libel, a candidate must show that the news outlet acted with reckless disregard for the truth either by knowing published material was libelous or not caring whether it was true or not. We knew several aspects of the rejected advertise- Editorial ment were false. By publishing the ad, we would have opened ourselves to a lawsuit. That wouldn't have hurt just us, but would have also hurt the people who were , unfairly libeled. Our attorney agreed the publication of the ad could land us in court. The Record has a policy of not accepting ads containing con-taining false statements. In our letters to the editor, we reserve re-serve the right to edit for falsehoods or to add corrections to a letter in an editor's note. , In both departments, we have not knowlingly fed untruths to our readership. We aren't going to start now. It will be said, no doubt, that we had other motives for our decision. We can only respond to that by the degree of integrity we show in our performance, week by month by year. That will be more enduring than last week's mailer or this j week's editorial. ' We do not regret our decision. ? J It is regrettable, however, when falsehoods and unfair j attacks are introduced at any point into an election campaign. |