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A group of Irish investors reportedly is contemplating a lawsuit against property journalists, charging the writers with purposely producing misleading articles about the international real estate market in the boom years.
“Journalists fear they may be made legally liable for misleading readers who followed their advice and bought properties abroad, suffering major losses,” Richard Compton Miller, a property journalist, told The Independent. “There's a lot of anger among investors."
On the surface it may sound like a desperate and frivolous attempt to find someone to blame for the collapse of the industry. But the case does strike at a vulnerable underbelly of the media industry.
Many journalists wrote glowing stories about markets after taking free trips to the destinations, a fairly common practice.
“If such a case were brought, it would raise questions about the responsibility of journalists who use supposedly impartial editorial space to promote commercial developments,” the Independent suggests in the story, cleverly headlined, “The False Estate.”
Of course, there is very little chance such a case would get to court, which the Independent gets around to mentioning about halfway through the story. (Suing journalists is “barking mad,” a lawyer notes.) But even the discussion says something about the market.
The idea of a lawsuit against journalists is “buyer's remorse gone mad,” Dublin lawyer Simon McAleese told the paper. “It's like the mad murderer's argument: you knew I was mad, you should have put me in a padded cell.”
