Imagine, someone using an online forum to complain about something. It boggles the mind doesn’t it. Apparently a number of physicians who’ve discovered the vision of loveliness known as the blogosphere were in for protological awakening when seeing some patients thoughts on their bedside manner.
The Wall Street Journal covered a story on Thursday on lawsuits for comments made by bloggers who were patients. They specifically mentioned Dr. William Boothe, an ophthalmologist in Texas who sued for libel and other claims and the Texas state judge “ordered the material removed from the Web.”
“The potential problems are huge,” said Matt Messina in the WSJ story, a dentist in Fairview Park, Ohio, and a spokesman for the American Dental Association. “My reputation is my stock in trade and we work years and years to build that reputation. To have that shattered potentially [by an Internet posting] is a concern.”
The problem comes down to a couple of basic points. The first, most obviously, is freedom of speech. It’s pretty basic and most people writing these comments claim they have the right to say what they want when they have a bad experience and with doctors, no matter how good they are, will inevitably make a mistake and it could easily cost someone their life. It’s part of the doctor business. That being said, there is another side of this deal.
In most cases, when people have bad experiences with any type of business, they have the right to picket that business. That’s in the law too BUT in most cases, there are rules to that picketing or protestation and that’s the way the courts seem to be seeing the blog thing. The rule is with picketing is that one can go to public property, i.e. the street in front of the business for or in this case the internet. They can carry a sign and can speak out but all of it has to be limited to the one person’s experience specifically and all one can say is how that business or in this case, doctor wronged them. They generally can’t say that “Dr. John P. Ublik is a butcher because he screwed up my ear augmentation”. It doesn’t work that way. The editorial comments have to stay relatively minor and it pretty much has to stick to the facts of the situation. If not, then one is open to legal action.
It’s a fine line but as the good dentist pointed out, reputation is how these folks stay in business and it’s vital to that business. While free speech is important, people also have a right to make a living. It’s my bet this is the way blog libel and slander will go. The other fine line though is deciding which blogs are actually journalistic in nature and which ones are more just personal diaries but that’s another article.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
