satire

Reuters' Alison Frankel reports on a D.C. Circuit ruling that a spoof blog posting by Esquire about a birther book questioning President Barack Obama's American birthright was not defamatory.

“Where’s the Birth Certificate: The Case that Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to be President” was published three weeks after President Obama released the long-form version of his American birth certificate, according to Reuters. The satirical post said the book was pulled from the shelves and fake-quoted an anonymous source saying, '“We don’t want to look like fucking idiots, you know?”' Reuters also reported.

Judge Judith Rogers, writing the court’s opinion, said the test for whether speech was satire was "'not whether some actual readers were misled, but whether the hypothetical reasonable reader could be (after time for reflection),'" Frankel reported.