Pummeled Post

Mobil chief wins libel award

"The press--wittingly or not--is coming ever closer to achieving the unrestricted right to defame any member of society with virtually complete immunity." So wrote Mobil Corp. President William P. Tavoulareas in April 1979 in an angry article for Saturday Review magazine. Seven months later, the Washington Post published a story implying that Tavoulareas had improperly "set up his son" in a shipping company and then helped his son's firm to get millions of dollars in Mobil business. To the Mobil boss, the article was an enragingly personal example of exactly what he had been complaining about. He and his son Peter sued the Post and virtually everyone connected with the story, from the editors and reporters to the sources they had relied on. Last week, after a three-week trial, a six-person federal jury in Washington, D.C., ruled that Peter had not been libeled, but his father had. The award: $250,000 in compensatory damages to be paid by the Post and two reporters and $1.8 million in punitive damages to be paid by the Post alone.

"They said I was a criminal," Tavoulareas testified, as he denied any wrongdoing. His lawyers pounded away at the contention that the newspaper had ignored "the truth each time it stood in the way of a central theme" of the story. The Post's lawyers responded that editors and reporters had given especially careful attention to questions raised internally during the story's preparation and each time had concluded that there was adequate support for the details that were finally published. It was "a textbook case of how a responsible newspaper should act," said Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee on the stand.

Indeed, the Tavoulareases' attorneys did not contest the Post's claim that it had handled the story with special care. Many lawyers thought that such care was a sufficient defense, at least in the case brought by the Mobil president. Federal Judge Oliver Gasch ruled that the elder Tavoulareas was a "public figure." Thus, under the prevailing Supreme Court standard, he had to prove that the Post had printed its story "with knowledge that it was false, or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." But the jury apparently concluded that however non-reckless the internal review procedures may have been, the Post's aggressive, go-get-'em style of newspaper journalism was itself reckless. That conclusion may not survive Judge Gasch's expected review of the verdict or an appeal that the Post promised to file if necessary.

Meanwhile, the verdict puts new pressure on journalists to play it safe. In the past two years, multimillion-dollar libel verdicts have been returned against the National Enquirer, Penthouse and the tiny (circ. 37,557) Alton (Ill.) Telegraph, which had to file for bankruptcy protection while it negotiated a settlement of the $9.2 million award against it. For such small press enterprises in particular, even the legal fees involved can be destructive. The Tavoulareases so far have spent $2 million on lawyers to fight the case, and the Post's defense has cost $1 million. Bills on such a scale, plus the possibility of losing, may inspire not merely professional care but unprofessional caution. Said New York Attorney Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment specialist, after last week's verdict: "We could move to a new level of low-risk journalism."

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