Defamers: A New Dark Chapter

I wrote Defamers: How Fake News Terrorized a Community & Those Who Dared to Fight It with the expectation that CalCoastNews was an anomaly we could eventually move past from. But I wouldn’t have imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would be eulogizing someone who was a target of their harassment for almost a decade more than a year after publishing my book.

There’s a lot I don’t know about the circumstances surrounding former SLO County Supervisor Adam Hill’s death. It would be a disservice to him and his loved ones to speculate. I am familiar with the FBI investigating him and the recent workplace misconduct complaint filed against him. Whether or not these factors played a role in his death, I don’t know.

What I do know is the extent of how his death was spun in ways that were demonstrably tasteless. CalCoastNews initially reported Hill’s death as a suspected suicide by gunshot wound, a false claim they walked back with a half-hearted “clarification.” If you get your facts wrong, it’s not a clarification.

They followed up their false claim by publishing a photo that showed Hill’s body being taken out of the home by the coroner in an op-ed discussing a legal theory for filling the supervisor’s now-vacant seat. The photo, which was published…