(Getty Images)
The University of Missouri is making an unprecedented legal claim of sovereign immunity on behalf of St. Louis Public Radio in the defamation lawsuit filed against it by former general manager Tim Eby.
Eby claims he was defamed by stories that quoted station employees accusing him of upholding “white supremacy.”
The university’s legal documents describe the station as “an arm of the state exercising exclusively governmental functions” and conclude that it should be granted immunity from Eby’s lawsuit.
Eby’s lawsuit is against the University of Missouri Board of Curators, which licenses St. Louis Public Radio. The legal defense of sovereign immunity has its origins with university lawyers.
The legal filings do not mention a case in which a public broadcasting network affiliated with a state won a claim of sovereign immunity in a defamation case. A LexisNexis search by Gateway Journalism Review found no rulings in which a federal or state court had recognized this government immunity from a defamation suit for a public broadcaster with ties to the government.
Sovereign immunity is a doctrine in English law to protect the king and government from lawsuits. Former President Donald Trump builds on this doctrine by claiming absolute immunity for presidential actions. Police officers and other government officials also receive qualified immunity from many civil rights lawsuits.
But so far no public broadcaster has won such a claim. In fact, they have run away from the government’s complications.
Last year, National Public Radio complained when Elon Musk’s X Platform labeled NPR a “state-affiliated” and “government-funded” media. NPR stopped posting content on X because it believed the government labels were undermining the independence of their journalists.
John Lansing, head of NPR, said at the time: “It would be a disservice to the serious work that all of you are doing here if you continued to share it on a platform that associates the federal public media charter with abandoning editorial independence or standards.”
When Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the statute explicitly stated that it “shall not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government.”
The university’s legal argument in the Eby case is that the station is “in effect an arm of the state that performs exclusively governmental functions and is therefore immune from liability” in the same manner as “the Department of Agriculture or a public hospital district.”
Eby’s attorney, Christian Montroy, expressed surprise that St. Louis Public Radio is portraying its news organization as “state-owned media” immune from defamation charges that other outlets would face if they published or broadcast the same content.
Eby’s legal filing argues that portraying St. Louis Public Radio as “exercising exclusively governmental functions” conflicts with St. Louis Public Radio’s oft-stated claim to be “editorially independent,” as expressed in the Statement of Editorial Integrity .
That statement says:
“….even though the University of Missouri System Board of Curators owns our FCC license, we maintain the editorial independence of our content. This is consistent with UMSL’s fundamental principle of academic independence on which the University of Missouri system is founded. The support we receive from the University of Missouri-St. Louis has no influence over our editorial content or reporting.”
Tina Pamintuan, CEO of St. Louis Public Radio (and Eby’s replacement), told the Riverfront Times, which first reported the sovereign immunity claim, that the public should not worry.
“I have 100% confidence in the journalism produced at STLPR,” she said. “Our reporters are highly trained professionals who take great care in their work. STLPR exists to improve the community and this region through honest, rigorous, fact-based news and information. That is our focus and it is important that we keep that in mind. Like all nonprofit media, we have limited resources that we can leverage by prioritizing our mission.”
The sovereign immunity claim, which the state has been making since last fall, came up for a hearing last month before St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Joseph Patrick Whyte. Joseph E. Martineau, a media attorney who serves as outside counsel for the state and the station, declined to comment, as did Christian Basi, spokesman for the University of Missouri.
Eby had served as the station’s general manager for 11 years until he was forced out in September 2020
His firing came after the controversial summer of 2020, when a group of staffers published a blog post accusing him of choosing to “uphold white supremacy at the station.” A story on the station’s website linked to the blog post and another story a year later stated that Eby resigned “amid accusations from newsroom staff that he ignored the station’s problems of systemic racism and mismanaged finances.”
Eby claims the station knew these statements were false.
Gateway Journalism Review’s Lexis search found only one case of defamation in the country where a public radio station affiliated with the state government had attempted to claim sovereign immunity in a defamation case. It was in Missouri and the station was lost.
In the 1982 case of Allen v. Salina Broadcasting, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Southern District ruled that Salina Broadcasting could not claim sovereign immunity even though the public radio station was run by a public school.
The station had reported that Allen, a real estate agent, was “starving his cattle.”
The appeals court had to decide whether the station’s report was part of the government functions at the school, which would give it sovereign immunity, or whether it was a “proprietary function,” which would mean it was not granted sovereign immunity.
The court ruled that the station’s actions were proprietary.
“At the time of the alleged defamatory broadcast… there was ‘substantially’ no student involvement…. the specific news program complained of was provided and broadcast by paid staff, with students rarely, if ever, called upon to participate in any meaningful way. ”
Eby’s attorney says the Salina case should inform the decision on sovereign immunity in the St. Louis Public Radio case. The St. Louis station acted in a proprietary, not government, manner, just like the Salina case.
At St. Louis Public Radio, paid staff compile and broadcast news reports without significant help from students. The reports are broadcast to a wide audience, not just within the university.
The state argues on behalf of the station that Judge Whyte should not follow the Salina case because a university is different from a local school. It points out that Missouri courts have found that a public hospital has sovereign immunity. St. Louis Public Radio is more like a public hospital than a public school, it says.
The post St. Louis Public Radio makes unprecedented claim of sovereign immunity in defamation case appeared first on Missouri Independent.
