Media Liability Insurance: What Is It And Why Should Every Newsroom Have It?
The thought of liability insurance can almost seem insulting to some journalists: your process is airtight and you know it, and you would never run the risk of reporting false information or anything misleading or that you believed to be of disservice to the community. But sadly, media liability as a legal term is much too broad to encompass the dignity of the journalistic process alone.
Media liability insurance is defined as “a type of errors and omissions insurance purchased by publishers, broadcasters, advertising agencies, authors, entertainment companies, and other businesses that create or provide content.” This coverage used to be similar to malpractice insurance for doctors (with the important distinction that journalists are nowhere near surgical equipment), but in the modern era, lawsuits against journalists—especially against investigative journalists—are becoming more common. Strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, are a favorite tactic of some bad actors throughout the United States to forestall journalists and bury them in litigation. Covering lawyers and fees can amount to an incredible amount of money, and SLAPPs can sometimes drag on for years.
To complicate the issue, there are now more places where newsrooms and journalists regularly post information: social media posts can be targets of SLAPPs, and even regular businesses can be hit with them. “We do see media liability claims as a threat to a variety of non-media businesses, like professional firms,” said Andrea Potetz, professional liability insurance product director at The Hartford. “We’re seeing firms on the receiving end of IP-related lawsuits, alleging copyright infringement of content in social media posts or business documents, such as marketing and training materials.”
What’s worse is that often, the goal of these lawsuits is not even to win—just to “silence news organizations whose work threatens powerful people and to bully other outlets into not covering them in the future,” according to Elise Czajkowski of the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Media liability insurance is the easiest way to keep your newsroom—and your employees—out of financial trouble if a SLAPP comes your way. Rates vary based on the revenue of the organization, the kind of content the organization produces (investigative journalists and newsrooms, as more frequent targets, will pay higher premiums) and the state that the news outlet is in. A policy will usually cover “any agent or independent contractor, but only while providing content to or on behalf of the named insured.”
However, they carry many pitfalls of insurance under capitalism: if your newsroom has already been sued, that will make it harder to get a policy or an affordable premium, and a lawsuit can cause the company to cancel your policy altogether, or else increase your premium. Also, the insurance company makes the process of hiring an attorney very bureaucratic: once you are served a lawsuit, you must file a claim with your insurance company and then allow the adjuster to advise on finding a lawyer covered by the company. Or, if you already retain your own lawyer, you must ask the insurance company to pre-approve the attorney before you buy the policy at all.
Still, these mild annoyances are the difference between some lost time and tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars lost. For some newsrooms, that’s the difference between continuing operations or filing for bankruptcy.
