When a judge issues such a ruling, the journalist must have done something truly noteworthy. And Berenson of the New York Times did just that.
This story started with confidential marketing materials belonging to Eli Lilly about its top-selling anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa leaked to Berenson. The documents were part of evidence turned over by Lilly as part of a lawsuit which claimed that side effects from Zyprexa caused excessive weight gain and diabetes.
Alex Berenson wrote a long front-page article about the documents Lilly didn't want the world to see. And what got the judge going was the way Berenson obtained the documents. Essentially, Berenson twisted the legal system a similar way any large defense law firm abuses our legal system every day.
According to the ruling, Mr. Berenson obtained the documents after he discussed ways to circumvent a protective order related to the documents. Mr. Berenson put one guy who had the documents in touch with a lawyer who simply issued a subpoena for the documents. Then the lawyer turned them over to Berenson. And this way they circumvented the protective order which applied only to the parties in the case.
Shocking? Of course Lilly is crying all the way to court.
Reality, in my humble opinion, is that this kind of trickery is exactly what any major legal defense firm practices on a daily basis. But the fact that a journalist makes an end-run around a court order, without apparently violating said order, shouldn't be very shocking.
Truth is that our legal system has long ago been subverted by very rich and very corrupt lawyers and our legal system simply can't keep up with their chicanery. That is the big problem, not the fact that a media company employs the same methods.
For full story go here and here.
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