the beatings will continue until you stop calling us thugs

[dilletante]

in the 1990s the cincinnati enquirer ran a corporate exposé series on chiquita banana-- i read about it after the series was over, but it appears to be collected here. on reading through it, it's kind of boring unless you're a stockholder-- the first article says that chiquita mis-timed an aggressive expansion of production capacity and was trying

Comments

[tla]

Well, isn't that sort of analogous to illegally-obtained evidence in court? It can't be used to convict even if it proves that the defendant is guilty, right?

[dilletante]

i don't think the court calls you innocent in that case, though. it simply says it was unable to convict you. the distinction between the truth of the allegations and the sanctions the government is able to impose in response to them is a little more clear-- at least to my mind.

a newspaper can't impose any sanctions at all, of course, except smearing your name in the public sphere. so if they publish true things about you that they obtained by underhanded means, i guess there's not much they can do to make the underhandedness up to you, except apologize and fire the person who did it and perhaps give you money.

[twoeleven]

right, this is the difference between private entities and governments: you can sue private entities for breaking the law. ha-ha, only serious!

IMVLE with big companies and legal troubles, the wording of the enquirer's retraction was probably worked out by their lawyers as part of a settlement. it's better for both them and chiquita if the matter not end up in court: the enquirer really doesn't want it a matter of public record exactly who approved what when, and chiquita likewise doesn't want a jury to get a good look at their dirty laundry. (disclosures of such things are complicated, but apparently possible

[dilletante]

i thought the difference between private entities and governments was that private actors could be arrested for breaking the law, unlike government agents, whom the government generally declines to prosecute.

i agree that it's stretching the word a bit to call the enquirer reporter a "whistleblower." (again, at least unless you're one of the stockholders who sued chiquita after the articles went public...) but otherwise, they both seem to me cases of a large entity having its dirty laundry aired in public, and demanding the teller shut up not because the allegations are false, but because they are true.

[oneagain]

apparently the british government is now taking this tack over the edward snowden leaks: detaining and robbing glenn greenwald's boyfriend, sending agents to destroy hard drives at the quardian, and generally letting it be known that this is in retaliation for their being portrayed as a police state.

um. The irony, it burns. It is, however, rather typical to use what powers one has, in this case, to bully, in order to preserve one's reputation and, thus, power, and they are used to a largely controlled/apathetic/fearful/silenced world that lets them do what they do (good grief, look what they've gotten away with so far, and for so long, with these tactics). Unfortunately for them, they come off to the actual observer as more sociopathic than psychopathic, which I expect is what they were aiming for (to be, or to get away with being, not to appear as

[intuition_ist]

...but they are a police state. cameras on every street corner.

Also, the Guardian destroyed the drives themselves rather than turn over the stuff to the police. See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london. Most of the news reporting agencies mangled the story. (Not surprising, given what I've seen of the hamburgernewsmaking process...)