A Roanoke jury ordered a controversial media outlet to pay Martinsville's top prosecutor $75,000 for defamation of character.

After Wednesday's late night verdict, Media 6 owner and operator Charles Roark said the eight-member jury's decision "makes it tougher for us to do our job."

He and his attorney, Martinsville lawyer Perry Harrold, said they would consider an appeal.

Martinsville Commonwealth's Attorney Joan Ziglar, who triumphed in court but was awarded far less than the $250,000 her attorneys asked for in court, was not available for comment after the verdict.

In February 2002, Ziglar sued Roark and his Media 6 news company for $3 million, saying that Roark had published a letter that defamed her in a tabloid newspaper, Buzz. The defamation trial began Monday, more than three years after the lawsuit was filed.

Roark's Martinsville-based Cable 6 television station had a reputation for salacious, gossipy innuendo, and Buzz, which ceased publication in 2002, had a similar reputation for outrageousness.

The Nov. 9, 2001, letter to the editor at the center of the lawsuit was from a Martinsville City Jail inmate named Za'Kee P.J. Tahlib, who had been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of a Martinsville man. Tahlib claimed in the letter that Ziglar encouraged his co-defendant to lie to a grand jury in order to frame him. He claimed Ziglar was seeking revenge for an affair he alleged to have had with her sister.

After the letter was published, Ziglar removed herself from the case. A special prosecutor dropped the murder charge. Tahlib was convicted of conspiracy to rob.

Arguments in the trial focused on publishing Tahlib's accusation that Ziglar had encouraged someone to lie under oath, which if true would mean she committed perjury. "Mr. Roark and Media 6 accused Miss Ziglar of committing a crime," said Bob Morrison, one of Ziglar's attorneys.

In court, Ziglar and other witnesses, such as Patrick County Commonwealth's Attorney Chris Corbett, emphatically called the accusation false. At the time, Tahlib was already a veteran of the prison system and knew how to manipulate it, Ziglar said.

Ziglar said that Media 6 caused her and her family lasting embarrassment and humiliation by publishing the letter.

She broke down in tears Tuesday morning describing how in her last conversation with her brother, who died from diabetes complications, he expressed more concern for her predicament than for himself.

Ziglar's sister, Cathy Amos, testified that she never had any romantic involvement with Tahlib.

Errol "Kip" Wallace, the primary on-air personality for Cable 6 and reporter for Buzz at the time the letter was published, testified that after he received the letter, he did not try to contact Ziglar, Tahlib or anyone else mentioned in the letter, nor did he try to verify any of the information in it, before it was printed.

Ed Wasserman, a journalism professor at Washington and Lee University, was called by Ziglar's lawyers to discuss Buzz's journalism practices. Speaking of the decision to print the letter without fact-checking, he said, "it's reckless, it's thoughtless, it's horrible."

Ziglar maintained in court that Roark and his employees hated her and looked for opportunities to attack her. Roark said after the hearing that his employees didn't contact her about the letter because "Miss Ziglar will not talk with us."

Harrold, Roark's attorney, argued there was no evidence that Ziglar's reputation had been damaged. He pointed to what he called a landslide victory by Ziglar in a contested November election as proof her reputation had not been harmed.

Roark said the verdict put unreasonable restrictions on who and what media outlets can quote. "It's not our words, it's their words."