Libel and Other Legal Threats in the Post-Truth World

Dale Cohen is Director and founder of the UCLA Doc Film Legal Clinic, where he leads a group of student-clinicians providing pro bono counsel to documentary filmmakers on a wide range of content issues, including vetting of films for copyright/fair use issues, and production counsel on all matters that filmmakers may encounter. Dale is a frequent speaker at media and entertainment law conferences and film festivals and also teaches a Media Law class at UCLA Law. He is co-author of leading textbook Media and the Law (2d Ed. Carolina Press).

Dale has also served as Special Counsel to Frontline, the award‐winning PBS documentary series, for nearly a decade. His extensive experience as a media lawyer, litigator and news executive includes positions at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, NPR, Cox Enterprises, Inc. and Tribune Company. Dale was also a litigation partner at the law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (now Denton’s) in Chicago.

Rick Davis was a 40-year veteran of CNN, serving his last 22 years as the company’s Executive Vice President of News Standards and Practices until February 2021. In that role, he was responsible for managing a team that worked daily with CNN colleagues across the country and globally to ensure that CNN’s reporting was fair, accurate, and responsible. Oversight also included review and approval of CNN staff’s outside work, books, speeches, and appearances in feature films and TV series. Davis also reviewed all political advertising for approval and worked with the business units of CNN to review their operations to be in compliance with CNN standards.

During a career that spanned more than four decades, Lee Levine represented media clients in libel, invasion of privacy, reporter’s privilege, access, copyright, and related First Amendment litigation, most recently as Senior Counsel at Ballard Spahr. In the U.S. Supreme Court, he argued for the media defendants in Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc. v. Connaughton and Bartnicki v. Vopper. Levine also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center for 25 years. He was the lead author of the treatise Newsgathering and the Law; he co-authored the casebook Media and the Law; and, together with Professor Stephen Wermiel, he co-authored The Progeny: Justice William J. Brennan’s Fight to Preserve the Legacy of New York Times v. Sullivan, published by the American Bar Association Press to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark decision. Levine was one of the founding attorneys of the highly regarded First Amendment boutique law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz in 1997, which merged with Ballard Spahr in October 2017.

Katie Townsend is a Partner in the Los Angeles office of Gibson Dunn, advising clients in the media, entertainment, and technology industries. Katie recently returned to Gibson Dunn after serving as the Deputy Executive Director & Legal Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where she oversaw the non-profit organization’s legal services portfolio, including its amicus curiae practice and the litigation and legal advising work of Reporters Committee attorneys. She began her career at Gibson Dunn, handling contract disputes, intellectual property issues, defamation claims.