MEDIA MONDAY / SUBSTACK PROTECTING ITS OWN

Illustration generated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT for PillartoPost.org

GUEST BLOG / From Substack--This week marked a big win for independent journalists and First Amendment rights. 

On Wednesday, the California First District Appellate Court affirmed that the defamation suit brought by tech CEO Maury Blackman against journalist Jack Poulson and Substack was without merit. 

In his Substack, All-Source Intelligence, Poulson reported that Blackman was arrested in 2021 on suspicion of domestic violence. Because Blackman was the president and CEO of Premise Data, a company with ties to the government and U.S. military, the court confirmed that his arrest records were matters of public interest and that the First Amendment protected Poulson’s work. 

We started Substack Defender to assist independent journalists facing exactly these kinds of threats: spurious lawsuits from executives, politicians, or other powerful people who abuse the legal system in an effort to shut writers up. 

Lawsuits like this are daunting for journalists—even if their reporting is fully protected by the First Amendment, the prospect of having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees can make it impossible to do their work. 

That’s where provisions like anti-SLAPP laws come into play, and where programs like Substack Defender make a difference. 

Substack takes great pleasure in using our resources to help protect writers from being bullied in this way. And it’s gratifying that in this case, the court not only agreed but upheld the awarding of attorney’s fees to the defendants. 

We will be putting the $240,000 in legal fees we’ll be recouping toward defending the next independent journalist who someone powerful tries to silence. 

SUNDAY REVIEW / INTERPRETING ARTIST ALFRED KUBIN [1877--1959)

 

A lone figure stands in shallow water, one arm flung sideways for balance. Beyond the waterline, trees rise into a darkness that gives nothing away. The scene ought to be simple. Alfred Kubin makes it difficult to leave. 

Look first at the figure. The pale body is the clearest thing in the picture, yet its movement is hard to read. Is this person wading toward shore, or farther into the water? Has something stirred beneath the surface? Kubin gives us the instant of alarm and withholds its cause. The ripples travel outward; our eyes search the trees for whatever might have sent the figure off balance. 

That uncertainty is the drawing’s strength. The water is shallow enough to stand in, but the pale foreground erases the legs. The dark trunks offer no shelter. Even the open space around the figure feels occupied. Kubin has made a landscape behave like a thought one cannot shake. 

The Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) (left) was a draftsman, illustrator and writer drawn to dreams, dread and the grotesque. His subjects could be far stranger than this quiet scene. Yet the same imagination is at work here. He does not need to show us a monster. He trusts us to supply one. The Leopold Museum describes his art as a meeting of actual and imagined reality, often shaped by pessimism, irony and unease. 

 Kubin knew how much darkness to leave on the page. The Museum of Modern Art notes that his youthful apprenticeship with a photographer informed his handling of light and shadow. In this image, the figure seems to emerge from the murk as though the scene were developing before our eyes. 

The effect is delicate, but the feeling it leaves is stubborn. There is also a tender possibility here. Perhaps nothing waits among the trees. Perhaps the figure has merely slipped on the bottom of a pond. Kubin allows that reading, too. His finest work gives fear its familiar shape: a person alone, uncertain of what has happened, trying to regain a footing.