Looking at Legal Issues for my Thesis

As part of this month's task for working on my thesis, I was trying to explore possible topics for the class I am proposing. One of those topics came to me in a most unexpected way last week. Following the revelations about women that say Donald Trump touched or kissed them inappropriately, I found myself in a conversation with Karen Desoto, an NBC News Analyst and defense attorney. Although not a pundit, she had an interesting take on the reports. In her opinion, they should have never been reported in the first place. Her argument was that the allegations coming out failed to meet what she believed should be the basic standard for reporting, which is whether the allegations would meet the legal standard for being admissible in court. In her opinion, allegations that were 20+ years old, that had not been verified or reported at the time, would never be admitted in court. Therefore, she thinks the New York Times (that is the case we were discussing) should have never reported it. In addition, she made the case that the editors of the paper should have known that the allegations would have a direct impact on the election less than a month off and that that should have played a role in them keeping the reports under wraps unless and until further verification came to light. I was intrigued?  Did she believe the writers at the New York Times failed to uphold their responsibilities as journalists? Yes, she said. Did we, at MSNBC, failed to uphold our responsibilities as journalists by reporting their reports?  Yes again, she believed. And she also felt that even citing the NYT didn't absolve us (a well-worn trick of journalists to pin the responsibility for stuff like this on someone else). Not only did the conversation pique my interest when it came to the legal and ethical responsibilities that come specifically with reporting events that we didn't actually see happen, but it raised questions to me about how those responsibilities should extend to citizen journalists - people blogging or posting things into the public. I asked Karen - do you believe they should have to adhere to the same standards?  Yes, she said - particularly since they have the potential to reach audiences at least as large as some TV networks.  Perhaps there should be some sort of threshold for the size of someone's online reach before opening the floodgates to potential libel litigation, but even those thresholds would be difficult to pin down. What if someone reports something when they have just a handful of followers, then the story picks up traction and they go over the arbitrary threshold set forth in our argument. Can they be sued or not? Essentially what we are asking here is: what are the standards for fact-checking and verification before its fair to report something about someone?  And once the "story" is in cyberspace, do we (either as journalists or citizen journalists or just citizens) take on legal or ethical responsibilities for the factual content of that story simply by retweeting it, or adding it to our blog?  Should we?  And should people who are putting original content online meet some sort of standard for their own content?  And if so, how should it be enforced? I think the legal/ethical questions about what Colbert used to call "truthiness" would be a key part of my thesis and an important topic that can be explored in my future class.