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Cox Enters. Inc. v. Nix

The Supreme Court reinstated the grant of summary judgment to a publishing company and its newspaper on an attorney's defamation claim arising out of two articles that characterized him as a criminal rogue lawyer

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This appeal arises from a suit for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress filed by attorney Franklin R. Nix against Cox Enterprises, doing business as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; an editor; and a number of unnamed individuals hereinafter, collectively, “Cox”. The suit was based on two related articles published in the Journal-Constitution on March 9, 1997, in one of which Nix was mentioned.1 The Court of Appeals affirmed the grant of summary judgment to Cox with regard to the claims for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress, but reversed with regard to the defamation claim. Nix v. Cox Enterprises, 247 Ga. App. 689 545 SE2d 319 2001. This Court granted Cox’s petition for certiorari to consider whether Cox was entitled to summary judgment on the defamation count also.

1. The essential holding of the Court of Appeals’ opinion is that although the portion of the article which mentioned Nix was a substantially accurate report of a judicial proceeding involving Nix, there was material in the articles which did not come from the judicial proceedings and which “invidiously compared Nix’s conduct to lawyers who had committed criminal conduct against their clients; this led the reader to reasonably infer that Nix’s conduct had been criminal from the context of the entire article.” Id. at 690. We conclude from a review of the record that the description of the article on which the Court of Appeals based its holding is not accurate and that its judgment based on that holding is error.

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