Lessons on libel: South African blogger sued for defamation · Global Voices
Heather Ford

Update 14th of January 2009: According to a post to his Facebook support group Donn Edwards signed an out-of-court settlement agreement with Quality Vacation Club in which he agreed to remove articles about QVC from his blog and not to write about the company for the next five years .
If Quality Vacation Club (QVC) thought that by suing blogger, Donn Edwards, for defamation they would silence any criticism of their dubious marketing tactics, they were wrong. Instead, the blogger’s case has started an avalanche of attacks from sources both in the blogging and mainstream media arena. Unwilling and unable to take the case lying down, Donn Edwards initiated a campaign that has sparked the attention of bloggers throughout the country – with suggestions that the community form a permanent group to monitor blogger freedom in the country.
This is what we’ve learned:
1. Solidarity is our greatest weapon.
Donn Edwards did a great job of couching the QVC case as a case against all bloggers in South Africa rather than just a personal attack. According to Guy McLaren:
QVC’s attack on Donn was interpreted as an attack on Blogging. Now most bloggers have at least 4 readers, some have more. But facts are that blogs are a powerful medium and if you want negative publicity, attack the blogging world and I know that Bloggers know people in radio, on TV, in fact some bloggers are from the press.
Apart from the 40+ blog posts and 100s of comments supporting Edwards, a Facebook group with 300+ members was set up for people to express support for Edwards, as well as a wiki documenting the growing number of blog posts and articles dedicated to the case. With his logo entitled ‘Blogger court case’, Edwards contacted other bloggers early on, asking them to write about the case, and so start a distributed network attack that left QVC spinning. Then, instead of QVC attempting to silence what Eve Dmochowska called ‘One lonesome blog, that is mostly focused on writing about computer security, and whose audience is probably least likely to be talked into a QVC sale anyway’, they now had hundreds of people making similar statements.
The irony is that, what became a transparent, community-driven campaign will end up being settled privately out of court. This will prevent a legal precedent being set for cases that will inevitably come up against bloggers in the future.
2.	The mainstream media loves a good David and Goliath story
My ears pricked up one morning in December when I heard popular talk show host, John Robbie, interviewing Edwards about the QVC case on Johannesburg Talk Radio 702. After the interview, Robbie took calls from others who had similar complaints about the company. And so the momentum grew. The Sunday Independent also wrote about the story – and more recently Noseweek.
The lesson? The traditional media love a good David and Goliath story. But add bloggers and social media to the mix and you might just start questioning who the David is in the story.
3.	Be careful. Take some time to think about the people on the other side of our blog posts and learn about your rights and responsibilities.
Probably the first high-profile case against a local blogger, Donn Edwards’ experience has shown how important it is to recognise that, with our need to criticize, comes a need to understand our rights and responsibilities.
Paul Jacobson has a post cautioning bloggers from adopting the ‘controversial title of citizen journalists’ but the fact is that whether we call ourselves ‘citizen journalists’ or not, a number of laws are triggered when we start publishing online.
Chris M. wrote:
‘This just goes to show that these days, as bloggers, we actually need to be really careful about what we say and about who we flame, because someone might be sitting on the other end, ready to pounce and take advance of us small bloggers.’
Perhaps the most insightful comment came from Tony Lankester.
There’s a warning in his experience that all bloggers, myself included, should heed. If you’re going to play in the sandpit of journalism, learn all the rules. Even if you plan on breaking them. At least learn from the dozens of court cases that have preceded you. Just because the online world is on screen only, it doesn’t mean that the real world laws of defamation and libel don’t apply. And just because you are your own headline writer, journalist, copy editor, editor and publisher, it doesn’t mean you have latitude to ignore the basic courtesies, practices and principles of good journalism.
Blogging has really grown up in the South Africa over the past year. Eve Dmochowska believes that we've learned a great deal about giving and receiving criticism well and has a great post on what she learned in 2008.
Most importantly, though, local bloggers have learned how important it is to work together. Hopefully something will come out of the Facebook wall post that Andrew Edwards (Donn’s brother) wrote on December 29, 2008:
Donn asked that I shut down the group once the last post about the saga is made on his blog. I thought we should then start a new group with a new name and mission. Any recommendations? Like “can a leopard change his snots” (a group to monitor blogger freedom and aggressive companies)??
Photo: ‘David vs Goliath’ by maha-online on Flickr – CC BY-SA