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Please accept my apologies for the delayed answer. I just saw your note today.

The short answer of why there's no libel lawsuit (yet) is that the criminal case hasn't yet gone to trial. Many facts which are now in dispute will be clarified by the criminal case. If any libel case gets filed it almost certainly would not be heard until after the criminal case finishes, and there's probably no point in filing until that happens.

The longer answer involves the protections of the “New York Times v Sullivan” case on libel law for media covering public figures. Zimmerman is definitely a public figure, so if Zimmerman wants to sue, he needs to prove not only that the report was false but also that there was actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth.

Could Zimmerman win a libel lawsuit? Ordinarily the answer would be no, not only because libel lawsuits are extremely difficult to win but also because a lawsuit against a major corporation — not just a libel lawsuit against media but virtually any lawsuit — requires massive amounts of money to have any chance of being successful. Normally a corporation (again, not just media) will settle a case to avoid a lawsuit going to trial.

However, the Zimmerman case has become so politicized that anything is possible. What I've seen so far with editing of the 911 tape seems, at least on its face, to be grossly irresponsible.

I'm sitting right now at my county courthouse reviewing the court documents on a variety of shootings, beatings, and other assaults. Nothing I'm dealing with is even close to the Zimmerman case, but I bend over backwards to get my facts right. Stuff happens, and I realize how hard it is to work under deadline pressures, but I have tremendous difficulty seeing how that news report aired without someone catching it during the editing process.

I've seen people fired for far less serious offenses which were totally unintentional. A reasonable case could be made that what happened with the 911 tape in the Zimmerman case was worse than unintentional, but again, we don't have all the facts yet.

Could Zimmerman successfully sue any media outlet other than the original outlet? Probably not. Libel cases are hard enough to win against the outlet which blew it without trying to win a lawsuit against those outlets which relied on AP to disseminate the original report.

There's another reason, however.

My guess is that if Zimmerman has a strong libel case (and he very well may have one) this will never go to trial because he will get a large financial settlement if he wins the criminal case and then sues for libel. How good of a case he may have depends on a lot of internal editing and fact-checking done by low-level as well as senior staff, and we don't yet have the information we need to know the facts yet. Remember, to win a lawsuit, Zimmerman must not only prove the report was wrong but also that it was produced with actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth, and that requires lots of testimony about internal editing and review procedures.

Bottom line: Let's wait and see what happens in the criminal case. If Zimmerman wins, and if he successfully sues for libel, this will have a major effect on a lot of newsgathering procedures and that may be a very good thing.

Please accept my apologies for the delayed answer. I just saw your note today.

Apologies? But of course none is needed. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Why would the libel suit depend on the outcome of the criminal case??? That sounds naive I’m sure, but in fact the thing speaks for itself - Zimmerman said “He’s black” in response to a direct question, as a matter of description of the subject, and NBC went out of its way to convert an objective description which no one challenge into a slur, and broadcast that blatant distortion nationwide. It beggars belief to suppose that the people who did that didn’t know that they were inflaming public opinion against Mr. Zimmerman. What would the “fact,” even if a jury were to so find, that Zimmerman subsequently murdered Martin, have to do with the nose-on-your-face-plain fact that NBC “climbed a tree to tell a lie” about Zimmerman? Only, so far as I can see, in the sense that NBC made it far harder for Zimmerman to get a fair jury if he is tried on the murder charge.

Zimmerman is definitely a public figure, so if Zimmerman wants to sue, he needs to prove not only that the report was false but also that there was actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth.

Wire service journalism - essentially the AP and its membership - makes anyone they talk about a “public figure,” in that sense. Did Zimmerman run for public office, or become a movie star? All he did was what government propaganda says we all should do - “If you see something, say something.” And then become involved in a killing. How many people - how many blacks alone - were killed in the US on the night in question? In the month in question? Are their killers all “public figures?” Dunno about you, but I never heard of any of them.
But even assuming the necessity of proving that NBC did what it did with blatant disregard for the truth, I honestly find it difficult to believe anything else of NBC. They had to know that they were obliterating the context of Zimmerman’s words, and giving them a sinister meaning instead of an objective one.

But it’s the history of AP journalism to do this sort of thing. The Duke Lacrosse “rape” hoax was a pretty transparent within a week, but it provided entertainment and titilation content for AP journalism for months on end, so long as they could sustain the pretense that there was some doubt about the innocence of the accused. It’s pretty obvious that promoting legal and sometimes (in cases Sharpton gets into) physical jeopardy for people is part of the very business model of AP journalism. AP journalism boasts of operating in the public interest, but its business model is interesting the public. And it simply doesn’t care whether the allegations are true.
In my previous post I mentioned RICO, and triple damages, and I didn’t mean that as hyperbole. I have no illusions that it would be an easy case, because of the enormous propaganda power of the AP. It would take deep pockets - or an awful lot of shallow ones - to sustain a fight to the Supreme Court, but AP journalism has proved to my satisfaction that it is a malevolent force in American society. There should be a class action suit, because the systematic target of the AP is not Mr. Zimmerman and it is not the Lacrosse players as individuals. The target is always people at large. The kind of people who would be Republicans.