ANOTHER Q POST CONFIRMED – POST #818 FEBRUARY 23, 2018 – EXACTLY ONE YEAR TO THE DAY - Libel laws. End of MSM.

these total Republican hit jobs without retribution?”

Clarence Thomas Wants to Open Up the Libel Laws

In his battle against the media he deems to be the “enemy of the people,” Donald Trump has repeatedly called for America’s libel standards to be overhauled. As a candidate back in February 2016, Trump vowed: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

In 2018, as president, he tweeted along the same lines:

Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2018

America’s legal standard on libel is complex, and rooted in the Constitution. In the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision of 1964, the Supreme Court set a standard that public figures cannot recover damages for libel unless a publication published falsehoods with “actual malice” — a term that covers both gross recklessness and malicious intent. The decision was pegged to the protections of the First and Fourteenth amendments, and the case was decided unanimously. For decades, the precedent has given the press leeway to critique public officials without fear of being bankrupted for making an honest mistake.

But President Trump’s call to make it easier for public officials to sue publishers now has at least once receptive ear on the current Supreme Court. In a brief filed Tuesday, Justice Clarence Thomas assailed the Sullivan decision, advocating for the court to return the responsibility for libel law to the states. (Thomas’ brief was filed as a concurrence in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear an appeal of a unsuccessful libel claim filed against Bill Cosby by one of his alleged victims.)

In the brief, Thomas decried the 1964 court, and the judges who have relied on the New York Times precedent, for producing “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.” Thomas — a self-styled constitutional originalist — would like to take libel law standards back centuries. “The constitutional libel rules adopted by this Court in New York Times and its progeny broke sharply from the common law of libel,” he writes, citing practices dating as far back as 13th century England.

Under the ye-olde standards of common law, there was no safe harbor for publishers who might get their facts wrong about a public official. Indeed, Thomas writes, “the common law deemed libels against public figures to be, if anything, more serious and injurious than ordinary libels.” Thomas concludes his dense legal diatribe by insisting there is “little historical evidence” that current precedent “flows from the original understanding of the First or Fourteenth Amendment.”

Noting that federal courts did not “begin meddling in this area until… nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified,” Thomas argues the court “should reconsider our jurisprudence in this area” and return the question to the states who “are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm.”

The call to throw out a bedrock precedent protecting the press is alarming at a time when sitting the president can’t take a joke from Saturday Night Live:

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

Encouragingly, none of the other far-right justices on the court signed onto Thomas’ brief, suggesting that, for the moment, Thomas and Trump share a lonely obsession. As Trump put it in a tweet from 2013: “The libel laws in this Country suck!”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/clarence-thomas-libel-laws-796704/

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Clarence Thomas Just Joined Donald Trump’s Crusade to “Open Up” Libel Laws

On Tuesday, Justice Clarence Thomas made a stunning announcement: The justice wants to overturn perhaps the most important free expression ruling in the Supreme Court’s history, New York Times v. Sullivan. That precedent, against which Thomas casually proclaimed war while voting to deny cert in the defamation case McKee v. Cosby, sharply limits the ability of public figures, including government officials, to sue their critics for libel. It remains the crucial safeguard of America’s free press, a bulwark against defamation suits designed to silence media outlets and chill public debate. If Thomas succeeded in killing off Sullivan, it would be, quite simply, the end of the First Amendment as we know it.

Decided in 1964, Sullivan was a disturbing illustration of how public officials could exploit libel laws to censor their critics. The case involved a full-page advertisement that civil rights advocates ran in the New York Times in 1960 condemning the Montgomery, Alabama Police Department. Titled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” the ad solicited funds to defend Martin Luther King Jr. against an Alabama perjury indictment. In describing state law enforcement’s abusive response to civil rights demonstrations, the ad made several factual errors—claiming, for instance, that King was arrested seven times, instead of four. It was, however, largely factual, and designed to alert readers nationwide of the police misconduct directed toward civil rights demonstrators in the South.

In the early 1960s, only about 400 copies of the New York Times were circulated in Alabama. Yet Montgomery Public Safety Commissioner L.B. Sullivan responded to the ad with a $500,000 lawsuit, alleging that it had defamed him in his capacity as supervisor of the police. Sullivan’s suit was part of a campaign among Southern segregationists to hobble newspaper coverage of racial injustice. By 1964, Southern officials had brought almost $300 million in libel claims against the press for (truthfully) reporting on civil rights abuses. The trial judge who heard Sullivan’s claim had announced his belief in “white man’s justice” and written a disquisition called The Confederate Creed. He found the Times guilty of libel; the jury then awarded Sullivan the full $500,000, a judgment that the state Supreme Court upheld. (These facts are detailed in Anthony Lewis’ famous book Make No Law.)

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the New York Times’ appeal, the justices were widely expected to reverse the verdict. They did, unanimously—but Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion went further than that. Brennan announced a new constitutional standard for libel claims against public officials under the First Amendment. To win a defamation case, Brennan wrote, plaintiffs must prove the defendants acted with “actual malice.” That means the defendants published an accusation “with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” Sullivan, Brennan noted, plainly did not prove the Times acted with actual malice.

Among civil libertarians and the press, the court’s decision was celebrated as a signal victory for the First Amendment. Philosopher and free speech advocate Alexander Meiklejohn called it “an occasion for dancing in the streets.” And rightly so: The decision effectively ended segregationists’ campaign to drive Northern newspapers out of business, or at a minimum, cut their circulation in the South. It also vastly expanded “breathing space” for the press under the theory that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” After Sullivan, “vehement, caustic,” and “unpleasantly sharp attacks” on public officials could no longer be silenced through libel lawsuits.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/clarence-thomas-trump-libel-new-york-times-sullivan.html