> Under the reporter’s privilege, a plaintiff in a defamation suit should first prove that what a journalist reported was false, defamatory and based upon unreliable sources before documents are turned over to anyone.<p>Unfortunately, this allows media to presume guilt and smear the subject while requiring extensive legal cost, pain and suffering, and often little to no recourse, even in court.<p>I’m not sure about the details of this case, but I have a close family member who the media decided to publish false allegations as fact. The scope of the allegations is large (related to billions of dollars of public money), but they were a salaried employee making less than a new grad at a tech company.<p>Following the stories, which are picked up and reported by other news outlets, social media runs with it and dumps even more accusations that have no basis in reality.<p>The end result was they were effectively fired, have to “prove” their innocence in the public square when all information to do so is private and confidential or held by those who made the accusations, and now have to go through life with the burden of extensive local coverage of actions of a false narrative. While they retained legal counsel, the cost and time to correct the record is likely out of their reach.<p>This has made me extremely skeptical of news outlets and what agendas might be pushing the stories they are publishing. It may not even be the reporters fault- they are given a juicy document dump that doesn’t tell the entire story and then they infer the worst about the subject. Once that’s done there is seemingly little a normal person can do to fight back.