We don’t have any new developments in the standoff between Judith Regan and HarperCollins for you yet, but in the meantime, Sharon Waxman compares the dispute to great Hollywood legal battles of the past. One sideline observer predicts that if Regan decides to press forward with a libel suit against her former employer, “she will open herself up to every scurrilous allegation. She will not enjoy one minute of this litigation. They’ll hire a bulldog, and it’ll be a bloodletting.” Maybe; on the other hand, Regan’s attorney suggests he might be willing to drop the libel charge if HarperCollins apologizes for calling her an anti-Semite, so the bloodletting might never take place. Here’s the nut graf of Waxman’s NYT story, though, if you ask me:
“Several lawyers said they imagined that the matter would never have received this much attention if not for the furor over O.J. Simpson. And they said they believed it would be settled quietly once the media noise died down because the negative implications for both sides were so great.”
The question, of course, is how long “the media noise” will last—especially given the existence of a new class of online journalism that thrives on producing a steady stream of content analyzing even the smallest developments in cases like this, which compels mainstream publications like the Times or the Wall Street Journal to advance their coverage, which gives the bloggers somethine new to parse, and so on, and so on. (Not that I’m knocking it, you understand, since I like buying groceries as much as the next fellow.)