Akin Gump Lawyers Speak at Geneva Press Club Event on Combatting “Fake News”
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(Geneva) – Akin Gump lawyers recently participated in a briefing at the Geneva Press Club titled “Getting It Right: Fake News, Due Diligence and a Strange New World.” The program featured a discussion about the true meaning of “fake news,” looking at ways to distill the facts and know where truth and fiction diverge.
Among the questions raised during the program included:
- How often are journalists, particularly reporters who cover commerce and financial markets, targeted by those seeking to prompt a false story for competitive reasons?
- Do legal options exist in the United States when a company is targeted with a false story that is intended to damage its business?
- How often do government agencies, or individual government officials, issue false reports regarding commercial entities that may be targeted for political or economic reasons?
- When a damaging story is disseminated by a media outlet, and the story purports to rely on anonymous sources or non-public documents, how do you get to the facts?
A video of the program, along with other details, can be found on the Press Club’s website here.
Moderated by M. John Edwards III, an editor at Bloomberg News, the program’s panelists included:
- Mark MacDougall, a litigation partner at Akin Gump who has been dubbed “The Cleaner” by The American Lawyer for his groundbreaking work in the field of reputational recovery. He has also been named a Litigation Trailblazer by The National Law Journal for his work in this area. (Click here to read more.) Mr. MacDougall has led numerous cases that have been widely followed by international media.
- Stacey Mitchell, a partner at Akin Gump who has extensive experience in crisis management and strategic counseling, including helping clients manage the tensions in business-critical decisions.
- Matt Apuzzo, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who has covered law enforcement and security matters for more than a decade and is the co-author of the book “Enemies Within.”
- Zoë Newman, managing director at Kroll who leads complex, cross-border forensic investigations into matters of fraud, corruption and potential regulatory breaches.
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP is a leading international law firm with more than 900 lawyers in offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
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