Newspaper sued for bad restaurant review
This article in the SMH: Fairfax was sued because a restaurant critic declared a restaurant had bad food and bad serice. The restaurant won... and are now able to seek further damages if they wish to.
Interesting: so was the reviewer supposed to fabricate something to publish, in case the restaurant wasn't so great? Isn't giving opinions his JOB? What does this mean for us, spouting opinions willy-nilly on the interweb? I guess Fairfax has a much (MUCH) larger readership than we do- maybe those opinions are somehow worth more because they are so public. Raises many questions about ethics, journalistic standards, freedom of speech, the climate of fear we live in, and also about paranoid restaurant owners.
There was an article in Slate about this: Frank Bruni wrote a bad review, gave somebody zero stars, and the owner took out a full-page ad in Variety to go into damage control.
Look, if reviews are only allowed to be positive, what's the point?
3 comments:
I could not agree with you more. I would say to the restaurant, " If the review hurt your business, the way to get the business back would be...wait for it...fix the things that were bad in the review." The invite the guy back and if you fixed the things, guess what, good review, more business. I believe the review would be even better the second time, because the reviewer would be stoked that someone actually took his criticism to heart
EXACTLY.. the same article was on Brisbane's Courier Mail website, and it really cheesed me off that such an event could occur. If the food's bad, and the prices are steep, then why mince your words? You mean reviews aren't meant to be objective?
Years ago when Leo Schofield used to do restaurant reviews something similar happened to him. Can't recall the outcome though. Think it was adverse for him if my recall is correct.
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