{"id":5116,"date":"2008-11-25T06:47:22","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T14:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2008\/11\/25\/seattle-pi-getting-sued\/"},"modified":"2019-12-23T13:25:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T21:25:41","slug":"seattle-pi-getting-sued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2008\/11\/25\/seattle-pi-getting-sued\/","title":{"rendered":"Seattle PI Getting Sued"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:4759,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/seattlepi.nwsource.com\\\/local\\\/389249_cranesuit25.html?source=rss&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.seattlepi.com\\\/local\\\/389249_cranesuit25.html?source=rss&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:4760,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/seattlepi.nwsource.com\\\/local\\\/292891_crane18.html&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20090201193314\\\/http:\\\/\\\/seattlepi.nwsource.com:80\\\/local\\\/292891_crane18.html&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-07 17:30:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-07 17:30:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/seattlepi.nwsource.com\/local\/389249_cranesuit25.html?source=rss\" title=\"Seattle PI: Operator of crane involved in fatal accident sues the P-I\">isn&#8217;t much of a surprise<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  An operator involved in a deadly Bellevue crane collapse has sued the Seattle P-I, saying the paper defamed him by printing details of his criminal history.<\/p>\n<p>  Warren Yeakey, the 36-year- old operator who was injured in the November 2006 collapse, filed the defamation suit in Pierce County Superior Court earlier this month. In court documents, Yeakey says the paper wrongly intimated that his arrests and convictions somehow contributed to the collapse.<\/p>\n<p>  &#8220;He felt like he was vilified falsely,&#8221; said Matt Renda, a Tacoma attorney representing Yeakey. The story, Renda added, &#8220;created an incorrect or false implication that operator error &#8230; was a contributing factor to the downing of the crane and the death of (Matthew) Ammond,&#8221; a Microsoft Corp. patent lawyer who was killed in the collapse.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I knew at the time of the collapse that the reporting of the accident <a href=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2007\/02\/12\/wanted-one-apology-from-the-seattle-pi\/\" title=\"eclecticism: Wanted: One Apology from the Seattle PI\">was not the PI&#8217;s finest hour<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  &#8230;when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI\u2019s response: an immediate <a href=\"http:\/\/seattlepi.nwsource.com\/local\/292891_crane18.html\" title=\"Seattle PI: Operator in crane wreck has history of drug abuse\">front-page article<\/a> digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy\u2019s day wasn\u2019t bad enough \u2014 he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then <em>rides the thing down<\/em> as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings \u2014 he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn\u2019t matter that he hadn\u2019t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder if the PI would be getting sued if they&#8217;d printed some form of apology or retraction at the time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This isn&#8217;t much of a surprise. I knew at the time of the collapse that the reporting of the accident was not the PI&#8217;s finest hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-5116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","tag-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}