Huckabee v. Time Warner

In Huckabee v. Time Warner, 19 S.W.3d 413, 420, 43 Tex. Sup. Ct. J. 674 (Tex. 2000), the Court affirmed summary judgment granted to a media defamation defendant that had been sued for statements in a documentary about four southeast Texas cases in which family courts granted custody of a child to the father after the mother accused him of child abuse. Huckabee, 19 S.W.3d at 417. One of the judges who presided over two of the custody disputes sued Time-Warner, alleging that the documentary omitted key information in an effort to depict him as biased or corrupt. The Court acknowledged that a publisher might present such an incomplete or unbalanced picture of the facts as to constitute evidence of actual malice. Id. at 426. On the facts of that case, however, we held that the record presented no evidence of actual malice, even though the story might have been misleading: Although the facts omitted might or might not have led a reasonable viewer to suspend judgment or even to reach an opposite conclusion regarding Judge Huckabee's order, their omission did not grossly distort the story. At most, HBO's failure to capture accurately all the story's details suggests an error in judgment, which is no evidence of actual malice. Id.