Former state Sen. Craig A. Peterson has dropped a lawsuit against the New York Times and now believes the Associated Press is to blame for a photograph of him being published with a story on the Salt Lake Olympic scandal.
"At this point we're going to focus on the AP," said Peterson's attorney, Roger Hoole, who has filed an amended suit naming the AP.On Feb. 9, the AP sent out a photo of Peterson standing in the Capitol rotunda with a caption saying a Salt Lake Organizing Committee's ethics panel had linked him, as financial adviser to the bid committee, to the corruption surrounding Salt Lake City's successful Olympic bid.
"Of course he had nothing to do with it," Hoole said.
The financial adviser was Craig E. Peterson, not the former state senator from Orem.
The Times picked up the photo off the national news wire and published it Feb. 10, and the caption, with a story on the Salt Lake Olympic scandal. The story and photo also appeared on the Times Web site. But once the Times discovered the mistake, it removed the photo from its Web site and published a correction.
Hoole said the Times convinced him that defamation law protects a news organization that is not the original publisher of the slanderous material. Since the photo and caption originated with the AP sending it out over the news wire, it is responsible, Hoole said.
"For some reason they sent out a photo of Craig A. Peterson with a caption that was very publicly damaging," he said.
Peterson stepped down from the Senate in 1998 to concentrate full-time on his engineering consultant business. Hoole said Peterson has a national client base and that many of his clients are readers of the Times.
"That caption and the way it was spread out has caused him tremendous problems," Hoole said.
Randy Dryer, attorney for the AP, said his client will file a motion soon saying Peterson is a public figure and therefore would have to show the AP acted with "actual malice" when it sent out the photo.
"This was simply a mistake and there wasn't any malice at all," Dryer said.
The AP will also argue that the Times article was nothing more than excerpts from the ethics panel report and the focus of that report was mainly on bid committee executives Tom Welch and Dave Johnson. Dryer said the article did not contain specific allegations against Craig E. Peterson the financial adviser. While the photo might have associated Craig A. Peterson with SLOC, guilt by association is much different than defamation.
"That is a bit of a stretch," Dryer said.
Hoole said if his client discovers that the Times acted negligently in the way it handled the information it received from the AP, he could refile the lawsuit against the newspaper. But currently he has no evidence showing that is the case.