Lawsuit Filed Against Darth Husker

Yesterday the Oklahoma Publishing Co filed a lawsuit against James W. Conradt regarding his fake story implicating Sam Bradford and Landry Jones in a drug bust.

I'm very interested to see how this plays out. Conradt appears to have went too far in using Jake Trotter's name, and allegedly using several copyrighted images off of the newsok.com web site. I thought the whole thing was mildly amusing, but am admitting that I am not related to Bradford or Jones. Conradt poked the turtle, as one of my good friends would say, of a widely read state newspaper that has the Gaylord Family as significant shareholders. Being as their name is on the football stadium and I believe the School of Journalism bears the family name - or the building, let's now slow down this post for me to check my facts - Conradt picked the wrong paper lampoon.

Conversely, the due diligence done by the radio stations that "broke" the story is appalling. Was anyone really getting their news off of www.darthhusker.com?

newsok.com writer Berry Tramel has an embarrassing video comparing internet message boards to porn sites. Still don't get that analogy. Plus, the newsok.com site allows readers to comment online at their site, where you get insightful reader comments like this one by Justin, posted recently on the article referred to above "Todd, you sir, are an idiot." The next one will probably be, "Jane, you ignorant slut."

With newspapers struggling, I could see this as the newspapers using what muscle they have left to attempt to narrow the landscape of blogging and message boarding via incidents like this one. While I'm not a media expert, I do believe that using the courts to inflict pain on foes that threaten your monopoly is not a good way to stem the tide of decreasing readership and ad revenue. The lawyers, however, will make out like bandits.

As a history professor told me in college, after I told him I was an accounting major, "In the battle of Armageddon, they'll need lawyers and accountants to bayonet the wounded." Come to think of it, Bayonet the Wounded would be a great blog name.