Mail Tribune Owner/Publisher deserves better advice

Dumb move by Mail Tribune owner.

Steve Saslow, owner of Mail Tribune, threatens lawsuit against Allen Hallmark, a local subscriber and critic. 

Could Saslow really be unaware that he is coming across as a thin-skinned, litigious bully?

 

Saslow's attorney sent Hallmark a "cease and desist" letter and demanded a "formal" retraction of his comments on social media. He demanded Hallmark delete a petition to "Save the Mail Tribune" plus Facebook and Twitter posts that criticize Saslow. He warned of substantial financial liability for civil damages. He demanded written assurance his demands will be met. He set a deadline that has passed.

Mr. Saslow's apparent lack of self-awareness is astonishing. The letter sent by the Mail Tribune's attorney does more damage to Saslow's reputation than anything Hallmark wrote. It tends to validate concerns published by Hallmark and others in social media describing him as a my-way-or-the-highway bully who throws his weight and money around squashing and silencing critics. And it puts that image of him back in the spotlight, creating yet more buzz on social media. Lose-lose.

It would be amusing if it were not sad. I want the Mail Tribune to succeed. A community needs a good newspaper. This requires a wise and clear-headed owner/publisher. Saslow's attorney complains that Hallmark's social media posts "tend to diminish the esteem, respect, goodwill or confidence in which Mr. Saslow is held."  Hallmark expressed concern that Saslow operates with heavy-handed disdain for opinions unaligned with his. Saslow's attorney says that isn't true, and calls that characterization of Saslow defamatory. And yet then, amazingly enough, his attorney writes a heavy-handed and threatening letter to critics, telling them to remove their criticism, thereby giving local subscribers new and ample reason to diminish their esteem, respect, goodwill and confidence in Saslow. Irony is not dead.

Saslow should have been talked out of this.  

Allen Hallmark's summary and interpretation of Saslow's editorials aren't fully accurate from Saslow's point of view. My experience with stories written about me in the Tribune over the decades is they are never fully accurate, to my mind. A reporter or any observer sees things from the point of view in which I am one person in a bigger story, being understood from the outside. I, of course, see things through my eyes, from the inside looking out. I know what I am thinking and intended to say. Other people observe me and interpret what I intend. I learned to live with the reality that other people's reporting and descriptions may seem less than flattering. Oh, well. No one remembers the details after a single day unless someone makes a fuss over the "bad" reporting, then they remember the fuss, not the subject of it. 

I would have thought the owner of a newspaper would understand this. Saslow disappoints me.

Saslow's attorney wrote an over-the-top letter threatening a lawsuit. He cites examples of errors. His letter says Mr. Saslow's editorial did not say he would outright "fire" employees when he saw something he didn't like. He only said employees should know their boss would be watching and would "reconsider their continued employment." That's different, sort of. He didn't say he was "taking over" the editorials as Hallmark said; only that they would "reflect more of my input" by his "leading its points of view."  Again, maybe the boss leading is different from taking over, barely. If Saslow thinks the difference is defamatory and demands a retraction, I suppose Hallmark should correct the record, but this really says more about Saslow than about Hallmark's comments.

Saslow apparently thought the right response was a sledgehammer of intimidation. It is possible Mr. Saslow thought he was operating in a realm where the reasonable thing to do was try to scare the bejesus out of the meddlesome little pip-squeak with a lawsuit that might bankrupt him. That should shut him up and it would send a good message to the community not to mess with Mr. Tough Guy.

And yet, oddly, Saslow's attorney's letter suggests Saslow's goal is to be respected here, possibly even well thought of. The letter presumes Saslow to have a favorable "reputation and good standing," and says Hallmark put it at risk. Possibly Saslow now lives in a bubble where he is accustomed to everyone treating him very deferentially, as befits an employer "reconsidering their continued employment." It may have become his expectation. But when Mr. Saslow wrote his editorial of February 28 he left that bubble. He became a newsmaker, announcing his changes to the local newspaper. He was in the public arena, where people one doesn't know interpret one's words, and where people question one's motives. Sometimes they get the motives and intent wrong--at least from the subject's point of view. After all, they are evaluating from the outside and aren't in the subject's head--or employment.

Time for Saslow to get some perspective. How does he think the people covered by his newspaper feel when they read stories about themselves? Is he getting a half dozen lawsuits a day? No. Because most newsmakers don't have the desire or money to sic an attorney on the Tribune every time they decide something wasn't flattering enough. They don't have the will or capacity to be a litigious thin-skinned bully, and don't want to be seen as one. 

Part of Saslow's problem was that his editorial was awkwardly written--possibly hurriedly, possibly entirely on his own, like an un-edited first draft that didn't really express what he intended. It gave many people the same impression Hallmark got. Feb. 28 editorial His actual plans were hard to decipher but his broader message was that the big boss was laying down the law, imposing his will on the paper and the underlings who create it. That went over badly. Two weeks later a clarification appeared. It had a very different tone. March 14 editorial 

Then, two weeks after that, Saslow reverses course yet again and sends out letters threatening lawsuits to Hallmark and others. How dare you misunderstand my garbled editorial!  

I don't blame Mr. Saslow as much as I do his advisors, particularly his lawyer, Mr. Frank D'Angelo. Why him? Because his name was on the letter as Saslow's agent, and it was the last good chance to stop Saslow from looking foolish. Saslow may have had hurt feelings. Possibly he felt misunderstood and disrespected. He wasn't being appreciated for his efforts to--in his view--improve the Tribune. His lawyer had a job to do--to let Mr. Saslow vent a little and then tell him the lawsuit-threat-letter should never see the light of day. He could have tried saying something like: 

"Steve, you don't want to look like a jerk here and this letter I prepared--well, Allen is going to pass it around to get advice from people and it's going to get noticed. This letter positions you as thin-skinned and brutal. These nit-picks I found will come across to people as phony. People will see right through me and know your real goal is to shut people up and make an example of them. It's a very bad look for you and the paper. This cease-and-desist letter will backfire big time. Plus it gives Allen and people like him new ammunition. Don't fall into that trap.  

How about instead you just write Allen a short email saying you think he misunderstood you and that you really do want what is best for the paper. Ask him to give you the benefit of the doubt here, and say he might come to think you are pretty fair, and if so, you would appreciate him saying so publicly sometime. Thank him for his concern for the paper. How about I have one of my associates draft something along those lines for me to show you?"

I am guessing he didn't do that. Or if he did, he didn't sufficiently warn Saslow that Mail Tribune subscribers were far more likely to identify with the local guy getting threatened and sued for speaking his mind than with the out-of-town multi-millionaire telling him to knuckle under and shut up. Or--maybe--the error really is Saslow's, and he got well-warned but insisted on doing it his way. In that case, I apologize to Mr. D'Angelo.

Head's up for Southern Oregon readers. We could be in store for something really wonderful, a full-on First Amendment trial in which a newspaper is on the unfamiliar side of trying to silence speech that describes issues of public concern. We will learn a lot about the Tribune. There would be evidence found in "discovery" from under-oath depositions of current, laid-off, and fired editors about what Mr. Saslow is really like. We would get to learn more about his financial relationship with Sinclair. Mr. Saslow's attorney warns Hallmark that his personal email accounts are relevant and subject to subpoena, and not to delete them. I am idly interested in Allen Hallmark's correspondence, but I am fascinated to learn what Mr. Saslow has in his email accounts regarding the management of the Tribune. It will be a great civics lesson for our community.

I have placed below a full copy of the "cease and desist" letter from Saslow's attorney to Allen Hallmark, so readers can evaluate Saslow's judgement on their own. It was forwarded to me from a friend of Hallmark, whom Hallmark had asked for advice on what to do. The friend sent it to me asking if I thought crowd-source funding would be a possible way to help pay for Hallmark's legal defense. After reading the letter, I said I thought Hallmark would have little trouble getting community support. 

                                                -----    -----    -----

March 26, 2021

Allen Hallmark

940 Washburn Lane

Medford, OR 97501-2052.

Re: False and Defamatory Statements Regarding Steven Saslow

Dear Mr. Hallmark,

My law firm represents Steven Saslow and Rosebud Media LLC. As you know, Mr. Saslow is the publisher of the Mail Tribune in Medford, Oregon. I write on behalf of Mr. Saslow to demand that you retract your intentional and reckless false and misleading assertions regarding Mr.Saslow and his work in connection with the Mail Tribune, and cease and desist from further such statements.

As you know, on February 28, 2021, the Mail Tribune published an editorial from Mr. Saslow in which he announced a series of improvements to the publication’s practices aimed at reducing bias and partisanship in news reporting and reestablishing the Mail Tribune as a trusted source for impartial and even-handed coverage. Since that editorial, you have embarked on a crusade to intentionally harm Mr. Saslow’s reputation and good standing and to falsely portray him as biased, corrupt, and untrustworthy in his management of the Mail Tribune. Driven by what
appears to be an unhealthy obsession with Mr. Saslow—you have posted about him on your social media accounts over a dozen times within the past month alone—and a fervent desire to have the Mail Tribune endorse and amplify your own personal political opinions, you have repeatedly criticized Mr. Saslow for not driving the Tribune in a liberal enough direction as a publication. In the process of doing so, you have made a series of provably false assertions regarding Mr. Saslow that open you up to substantial liability for civil damages.

On or about March 1, 2021, you created and published a petition on the website change.org entitled “Save the Medford Mail Tribune from its owner's changes!” That petition contains the following statements regarding Mr. Saslow, among others:

[Mr. Saslow] will take over from an editorial board to decide which editorials run & which don’t. He will fire any reporter who he thinks is slanting the news. He will no longer run stories from the Washington Post or other newspapers he thinks are “slanted” toward the liberal side. He will also reject all letters to the editor on national topics because he said liberals and progressives submit 10 to 1 the number of letters that conservatives submit. He’ll only accept letters about “local” and “regional” issues – without defining those terms.

1 This statement contains numerous falsehoods regarding Mr. Saslow and the improvements that he announced on February 28. First, Mr. Saslow will not “take over from an editorial board to decide which editorials run & which don’t.” This statement conveys the false and misleading impression that Mr. Saslow will fully usurp the editorial board’s process. To the contrary, Mr. Saslow has said that although that he will have more input in that process, he will continue to allow the board to make decisions regarding editorial content. As the Mail Tribune’s Editor-in-Chief, Justine Umberson, confirmed in an editorial published on March 14, 2021,2 “editorial opinions will not be [Mr. Saslow’s] alone, but will be a consensus of the [editorial] board.”

Second, Mr. Saslow will not “fire any reporter who he thinks is slanting the news.” This statement conveys the false and misleading impression that Mr. Saslow will arbitrarily and immediately terminate any reporter who authors a story diverging from Mr. Saslow’s personal opinions. This is not true. Mr. Saslow explained that reporters who inject their personal bias into fact-based reporting—regardless of what that personal bias is and regardless of whether it accords or does not accord with Mr. Saslow’s personal opinions—would have their “continued employment” “reevaluated.” Especially when viewed within the context of Mr. Saslow’s editorial, it is clear that his statement applied to news stories and not opinion pieces. This is because, as Mr. Umberson noted in his editorial, the Mail Tribune, “risk[s] [its] credibility when we try to be activists, appeal to activists, or try to slant news reporting in any manner.”

Third, it is unequivocally false that Mr. Saslow “will no longer run stories from the Washington Post or other newspapers he thinks are ‘slanted’ toward the liberal side.” The Mail Tribune will continue to publish both Washington Post new stories and opinion pieces. “We will continue to run feature stories such as food and entertainment articles from The Washington Post, and we are not dropping Post editorials or columnists from the opinion pages,” Mr. Umberson has affirmed.

Fourth, Mr. Saslow will not “reject all letters to the editor on national topics” and “only accept letters about ‘local’ and ‘regional’ issues” Mr. Saslow expressly stated in his editorial that the Mail Tribune will continue to publish on its website letters to the editor regarding national topics.

These false statements were not merely limited to the Change.org website. In an effort to draw more attention to your statements, you have continued to post, re-post, promote, and amplify them on your publically [sic] viewable social media accounts. You have linked to the Change.org petition on your Facebook page no less than seven times in the past month, including in: a comment to your own February 28, 2021, 7:20pm post; a comment to your own February 28, 2021, 10:43pm post; a post on March 1, 2021, at 11:20pm; a post on March 4, 2021, at 1 See “Save the Medford Mail Tribune from its owner's changes!,” CHANGE.ORG,  https://www.change.org/p/residents-of-southern-oregon-northern-california-save-the-medford-mailtribune-from-its-owner-s-changes.

2 See Justin Umberson, “Judge newspaper on our work, not interpretation of changes,” MAILTRIBUNE.COM (Mar, 14, 2021),https://www.mailtribune.com/opinion/2021/03/14/judge-newspaper-on-our-work-not-interpretation-of-changes/

Allen Hallmark  March 26, 2021  Page 3

12:06am; a post on March 5, 2021, at 8:25pm; a comment to your own March 13, 2021, 7:32pm post; and a comment to your own March 14, 2021, 3:29pm post. You also linked to the petition on your Twitter account on March 1, 2021, at 11:43pm and on March 5, 2021, at 3:07pm.

In addition to re-posting that petition multiple times, you also published standalone social media posts with yet additional false and misleading statements. For example, in a Facebook post on February 28, 2021 at 4:02pm, you falsely stated that Mr. Saslow would allow “[n]o more reprints from that biased Washington Post,” and “from now on the paper will run only [letters to the editor] that focus on local and regional issues.” In your March 13, 2021, 7:32pm Facebook post, you falsely stated that “[s]tories from The Washington Post and ‘other slanted sources’ will soon no longer appear’ and that “[t]he [Mail Tribune] will no longer publish letters to the editor about
national news topics.”

Not merely satisfied to keep to social media, you also provided false and misleading statements to the Ashland Chronicle for publication on its website, including in the March 10, 2021 article entitled “Exclusive Interview by Susanne Severeid with Allen Hallmark Regarding the Petition to Challenge the Trib’s New Direction.”3 That article, which republished the false and misleading introduction to your Change.org petition, contained several new defamatory statements from you regarding Mr. Saslow. You were quoted therein as stating that Mr. Saslow “is threatening his reporting staff that if they write anything that HE considers to be slanted that they could lose their jobs,” and that he “wants this paper to reflect what his beliefs are now.” You also stated 
that Mr. Saslow “comes up with this bull—t about how they’re going to no longer print [letters to the editor] that are about national issues and you can only submit letters about local or regional.”

All of these statements are provably false. They constitute statements of fact regarding Mr. Saslow’s actions, beliefs, and intentions that are directly contrary to what Mr. Saslow wrote in his February 28 editorial. The falsity of your statements were further laid bare by Mr.Umberson’s subsequent editorial—a copy of which you posted to your Facebook page on March 14, 2021, at 3:29pm, and were thus indisputably aware of. Despite knowing that these statements were false, you allowed them to remain available for the public to read online and have continued to doubled-down on them in the weeks since.

The statements at issue here are defamatory for the simple reason that they portray Mr. Saslow as compromised, untrustworthy, and biased in his capacity as publisher of the Mail Tribune. In doing so, they falsely attribute to Mr. Saslow a lack of independence and integrity that is “incompatible with the proper conduct” of a news publisher and are defamatory per se. See Elizabeth Retail Props., LLC v. KeyBank Nat’l Ass’n, 83 F. Supp. 3d 972, 993 (D. Or. 2014) ("In the professional context, a statement is defamatory if it is false and ascribes to another conduct, characteristics or a condition incompatible with the proper conduct of his lawful business, trade, 
or profession. Statements falsely alleging facts that are 'likely to lead people to question a plaintiff's fitness to perform his job' are defamatory per se.") (citation and alterations omitted); 3 See Susanne Severeid, “Exclusive Interview by Susanne Severeid with Allen Hallmark Regarding the Petition to Challenge the Trib’s New Direction,” ASHLAND CHRONICLE (Mar. 10, 2021), https://theashlandchronicle.com/exclusive-interview-by-susanne-severeid-with-allen-hallmark-regarding-the-petition-to-challenge-the-tribs-new-direction/

Allen Hallmark  March 26, 2021  Page 4

see also, e.g., Or. Nerve Ctr., Ltd. Liab. Co. v. Law lor Winston, LLP, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 17586, at *29-30 (D. Or. Feb. 7, 2013) (“defendant’s statement creates a reasonable defamatory inference that [plaintiff] is a ‘hired gun’ who was paid specifically to deny the existence of RSD/CRPS without any medical independence”).

Even if your statements cannot be read as ascribing characteristics to Mr. Saslow that are incompatible with proper conduct in his business, they at the very least “tend[ ] to diminish the esteem, respect, goodwill or confidence in which” Mr. Saslow is held or “excite adverse, derogatory or unpleasant feelings or opinions against him,” and are therefore defamatory for that independent reason. Elizabeth Retail, 83 F. Supp. 3d at 993.

Accordingly, we hereby demand on behalf of Mr. Saslow that you (i) remove the Change.org petition entitled “Save the Medford Mail Tribune from its owner's changes!”; (ii) remove the aforementioned posts on your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as any other social media posts you may have published that contain similar false or misleading statements regarding Mr. Saslow; (iii) inform the Ashland Chronicle that you have removed the Change.org petition and that you are formally retracting the aforementioned statements that were published in Ms. Severeid’s March 10, 2021 article; and (iv) no later than Friday, April 2, 2021, provide me with your written assurance, by email or otherwise, that you have complied with the foregoing demands and will continue to do so. Please be advised that if you refuse to comply with, or choose to ignore, the above demands, my client will assume that you do not wish to resolve this matter amicably.

In light of the foregoing, and as required by law, you must also immediately take appropriate steps to preserve all documents and data (in paper, electronic, or other form) that are relevant to your unlawful defamatory conduct set forth above. This includes, without limitation, any relevant emails on your personal account (e.g., Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) and current work account (if any), as well as any relevant text messages and voicemails. Your destruction of any such documents or data could subject you to severe legal penalties.

Please note that this letter is not intended to be a complete statement of all facts, evidence, or relevant legal principles. Nothing stated in or omitted from this letter should be construed as or deemed to be a waiver, relinquishment, or compromise of any of Mr. Saslow’s or Rosebud Media’s legal or equitable rights, remedies, claims, or arguments, all of which are hereby expressly reserved.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Frank D. D'Angelo

Partner

cc: Steven Saslow, Rosebud Media LLC (via email/BCC