The premier U.S. journalists’ union wants my emails.
Specifically, in response to a critic’s defamation lawsuit, The NewsGuild filed a motion seeking a critic’s correspondence with The New York Times — in this case, with me. They’re also seeking the correspondence of a woman who sought to tip that reporter to sexual misconduct inside the union.
The legal motion represents a strange coda to a story that revealed how both the union and newsroom management have been slow to respond to complaints of a union leader’s sexual misconduct.
The motion came in the course of a 2021 lawsuit filed by Mike Elk, the founder of Payday Report and a vocal critic of the union’s leadership, against NewsGuild’s parent union, the Communications Workers of America, and two of the Guild’s top officers. Elk claims in Pennsylvania court filings that the defendants defamed him as he tried to report the Pittsburgh NewsGuild president, Mike Fuoco, for sexual misconduct.
The Pittsburgh official was ousted from the union in December 2020, after I investigated Elk’s allegations as a reporter for the Times.
Lawyers for the Guild and its top officers demanded last fall that Elk “identify every individual associated with the New York Times that you have communicated with regarding the lawsuit and the allegations … and state the contents of each communication.”
Elk argued in response that his communications with Times reporters are protected by the First Amendment. In a response on Sept. 1, lawyers for the journalists’ union wrote that Elk “may not use the First Amendment simultaneously as a sword and shield.”
They’ve also demanded that Elk hand over his full correspondence with his own sources on the allegations against Fuoco, including a former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter (now a NewsGuild member at another publication) who alleged that Fuoco had acted inappropriately toward her, as well as two other women slightly connected to the story.
“We are always troubled when litigants use discovery to seek communications between sources and journalists, and it is especially concerning coming from a union that represents journalists,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email to me, adding that the Times would “assess” intervening in the case as it progresses.
The Guild, for its part, makes no apologies for requisitioning the communications between a reporter and source: “We have a right and a duty to defend our members against frivolous lawsuits,” the union president, Jon Schleuss, told me in an email through a spokeswoman. (Schleuss and the former president of the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild are named in the suit.)
“Mike Elk made his communications to Ben Smith a relevant component of his lawsuit against our members. As a result, we have asked Mike Elk in discovery for his communications. We will continue to fight to protect journalists and all of our members against any attempts to undermine our growing power and solidarity.”
Elk noted that a judge has rejected the union’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit as frivolous. “This is a dangerous precedent for the NewsGuild to set. If we lose in court, every right-wing billionaire will cite Elk vs. NewsGuild to get people to give up sources,” he said. “At a time when NewsGuild is under attack throughout the industry, the union is spending money getting reporters to give up sources.”
archive link: https://archive.ph/8jtzC
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