The incremental harm doctrine "measures the incremental harm inflicted by the challenged statements beyond the harm imposed by the rest of the publication. If that harm is determined to be nominal or nonexistent, the statements are dismissed as not actionable."

—the Court held that where a particular published view is not actionable as defamation, "other statements—even those that might be found to have been published with actual malice—should not be actionable if they merely imply the same view, and are simply an outgrowth of and subsidiary to those claims upon which it has been held there can be no recovery."

Therefore, we hold that the evidence in the record is insufficient to support a reasonable jury finding that the plaintiff has shown actual malice by clear and convincing evidence.

The cases cited by The Advocate in support of its argument that this court should invoke the doctrine of incremental harm all arise from other jurisdictions

It is self-evident that information acquired after the publication of defamatory material cannot be relevant to the publisher's state of mind or his alleged malice at the time of publication

And a single false statement is no less actionable because it is surrounded by true derogatory statements; indeed, according to one court, the accompanying truth may aggravate the harm of the libel by increasing its credibility.

Additionally, the allegedly fabricated "intellectual gigolo" quote is non-defamatory under the "incremental harm branch" of the "libel-proof" doctrine.

Likewise, even if the proof indicates that the declarant did not mean to endorse the negative innuendo, but the communication, read or viewed as a whole objectively, conveys that the publisher meant such meaning, the test is met

Anthony Herbert, a retired Army officer, who accused American forces of committing war crimes in Vietnam.