The father of one of the two young men pictured and described as “bag men” on the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post after the Boston Marathon bombings, and who had nothing to do with it, is considering suing the newspaper.
Good. I hope he does, and puts a serious crimp into Murdoch’s fortune.
“A lot of people, they tell me that’s your right to sue them,” says [El Houssein] Barhoum, who says he is working toward a contract with a lawyer. “I will give him my case and he will study it.” The Erik Wemple Blog is already on record as favoring this approach.
Should the family file a civil complaint, it’ll surely address the upheaval that the New York Post has helped bring to the Barhoum household. The son in the photo, Salah Barhoum, a 16-year-old track athlete (other accounts say he’s 17), sleeps one or two hours per night these days, says El Houssein Barhoum, and sometimes “refuses to go to school.” “He says, ‘I don’t want people to ask me a lot of questions,’ ” the father reports.
Before the photo hit the New York Post, it circulated on the Internet, a scary development that prompted Salah Barhoum to meet with authorities to clear his name. That was on Wednesday, two days after the bombings. On Thursday, the Post chose to showcase Salah Barhoum and a friend.
Following all the attention, “We were just scared to go outside,” says El Houssein Barhoum, who says he works at a Cosi restaurant in Boston.
Erick Wemple, who blogs about media for The Washington Post, explains why the two young men have a case.
L. Lin Wood, a prominent Atlanta-based attorney who represented Richard Jewell in his famous cases against media outlets over coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, sees a stack of plaintiff-friendly facts: “Based on what I see here, I would think this is definitely a case of defamation by implication. Looking at the totality of the article in conjunction with the headline and the use of the photograph, what it would suggest is that this man is a suspect and may have been a potential suspect, and I think that is defamatory.”
Murdoch himself doesn’t think his newspaper did anything wrong.
All NYPost pics were those distributed by FBI.And instantly withdrawn when FBI changed directions.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) April 20, 2013
