More interesting than the media outlets Welter’s claim is trying to stifle is the way that Kelly/Warner Law Firm attempted to remove the links from Google:
Welter filed a defamation lawsuit against McMahon, and McMahon submitted a stipulation saying that his original allegations were false. (It is impossible to tell from the record whether the signer of the stipulation was indeed the real Ryan McMahon, but let us assume that he was.)
Welter then got an injunction stating that McMahon’s allegedly defamatory statements were posted on ABC News, Fox Sports, CBS News and USA Today, presumably because articles on those sites were based on those statements. And the injunction stated that defendant must take all actions, “including requesting removal of the URLs from all internet search engines … to remove all such webpages and cache from the Internet, such that the Content is rendered unsearchable.” Again, because this was a stipulated judgment, there was no factual determination of whether McMahon’s statements were actually defamatory. For a similar example, see Desert Palm Surgical Group v. Petta, which was used to try to deindex a CNN Money article. – Eugene Volokh of The Washington Post
