Will Journal Sentinel Concede Errors?

Mandela Barnes. (Public Domain).

Back on July 30, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did an extraordinary story entitled “Sources detail concerns about Mandela Barnes‘ behavior toward women.”

This ominous-sounding headline was slapped on a story that proved almost nothing, as a column I wrote for Urban Milwaukee noted on Aug. 3:

“As the headline suggests, the newspaper had no on-the-record comments to prove anything nefarious was going on. Indeed, it really had only one source to talk about this ‘behavior,’ but she offered no evidence of any abuse or mistreatment, or of favors offered or denied. They had sex after a night of heavy drinking back at the state Democratic convention in 2018, when Barnes was running for lieutenant governor and held no political office. So two consenting adults had sex after drinking at a convention. If that was newsworthy, the paper could be doing thousands of stories a year on this.”

The column went on to note the lack of any evidence for any of its claims, including that there was a supposed investigation of Barnes by the state Democratic Party, that an outside law firm was hired to “review allegations” and that “concerns about Barnes’s relationships reached a fever pitch” in Democratic circles. All asserted with no real proof.

“This is simply not a story and never should have been published,” the column concluded.

Adding insult to injury, the newspaper implied that Barnes dropped out of the Democratic primary because the Journal Sentinel investigation was so damaging. But Barnes never cited this as a reason for his withdrawal, instead conceding he was too far behind in the race.

Last week, an attorney for Barnes, Michael J. Cerjak, sent the Journal Sentinel a “Demand for Correction and Retraction,” as Wisconsin Right Now was the first to report. The 10-page letter goes into great detail describing the dearth of evidence for the story’s claims and ultimately demands a long list of retractions, including the following:

1. Retract the report that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin retained an outside law firm to investigate Mr. Barnes or allegations concerning his conduct.
2. Retract the report that the party launched an outside probe or conducted an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior by Mr. Barnes.
3. Retract the assertion that Mr. Barnes repeatedly took advantage of his political status, office, role, power, or authority to obtain sexual encounters.
4. Correct and retract the characterization of the accusations described in the Articles as “allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct,” and clarify that no source identified in the Articles accused Mr. Barnes of nonconsensual sexual activity, assault, workplace harassment, coercion, abuse, or a sexual quid pro quo.
5. Correct the false implication that multiple women accused Mr. Barnes of predatory, coercive, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate conduct.
6. Correct the false implication that Mr. Barnes’s withdrawal from the gubernatorial race resulted from the Journal Sentinel’s inquiries, allegations of misconduct, or a party investigation.
7. Publish corrected headlines and summaries that do not continue to imply that multiple women described misconduct by Mr. Barnes or that he was the subject of an investigation into sexual misconduct.
8. Remove or correct the inaccurate AI Overviews and any other automated summaries appearing with the Articles.
9. Place the correction and retraction prominently at the top of each affected online article and publish it in a position and manner at least as prominent as the original reporting.
10. Correct any materially identical social-media posts, alerts, summaries, or other publications controlled by the Journal Sentinel or Gannett.
11. Take reasonable steps to notify syndication and republication partners that the challenged reporting has been corrected and retracted.

The letter offers a sample of a proposed correction and retraction the newspaper could run and adds: “Please confirm in writing within seven days after receipt of this notice whether the Journal Sentinel will publish the requested correction and retraction.”

While the letter was emailed to the newspaper on October 28, the legal clock starts ticking on the eighth day after the certified letter to the newspaper was received, which gives the JS until Tuesday, November 10, to run a retraction. The newspaper could, of course, request more time, but a delay in publishing a retraction would not help its cause should it then have to defend itself from a libel suit. And ultimately that’s what this retraction request is meant to do: to set the stage for a libel complaint demanding the payment of damages. As the website for Cerjak notes, the attorney “has achieved record-setting results that highlight both his courtroom skill and his dedication to vindicating fundamental rights. He secured a $2.4 million defamation verdict — the largest in Wisconsin history and the largest ever in Taylor County — and a $7 million civil rights judgment stemming from critical lapses in medical care, similarly the largest of its kind.”

In short, you can expect this issue is now being reviewed by lawyers and executives at Gannett, the company that owns the Journal Sentinel. They can’t be happy about the situation.