Tough libel laws will save journalism

The Washington Post reported, “Scores of news organizations — including The Washington Post — on Friday demanded congressional leaders release a trove of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that the House speaker provided exclusively to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has downplayed the violence.”

None of these news organizations demanded this footage from Nancy Pelosi because the video undercuts the false narrative of an insurrection. Demanding the video now makes the story about the footage not what the footage shows.

American trust in the media is at an all-time low. Stunts like this show the trust is still too high. Media lies did this. The governor of Florida may force the media to stop lying, which is the only way to salvage the media’s poor reputation.

Politico’s Florida reporter, Matt Dixon, reported, “DeSantis wants to roll back press freedoms — with an eye toward overturning Supreme Court ruling.”

Hallelujah. Finally, someone will hold the Fourth Estate accountable for its massive lies about conservatives. Dixon referred to overturning Sullivan v. New York Times, which held that an ad in NYT by Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights leaders were within their rights when they libeled the Birmingham Police.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was over-the-top and gave the press a license to lie. The court could have ruled in favor of the defendants without allowing the wholesale libel of public figures without any accountability. Justices had another agenda in enabling lying.

The court said public figures must prove malice by the publication. That is a mountain too high to climb. Even Sarah Palin could not scale it when the rabidly anti-Palin NYT said she targeted politicians for assassination. The court agreed with NYT that this was just an oopsie mistake and not an attempt to equate her actions with a Democrat who attempted to assassinate nine Republican congressmen at a baseball practice.

Americans finally are fighting back.

Dixon stated, “At the governor’s urging, Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature is pushing to weaken state laws that have long protected journalists against defamation suits and frivolous lawsuits. The proposal is part of DeSantis’ ongoing feud with media outlets like The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and The Washington Post — media companies he claims are biased against Republicans — as he prepares for a likely 2024 presidential bid.”

But the bias is so obvious that even a crypto crook can see it. Sam Bankman-Fried bought off every politician he could for protection.

He said, “All my Republican donations were dark. The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super-liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”

The Miami Herald takes every opportunity possible to ridicule DeSantis. It opposes his actions be it his response to covid (which time proved correct) or his handling of Disney or even his handling of hurricanes. The newspaper is entitled to do so, as long as it remains factual.

And therein lies the problem. The press now lies unapologetically. Consider what they did to President Trump for four years.

The Russiagate Collusion story was a lie from the deep state used to discredit President Trump’s election. The press pushed this lie, even though reporters knew it was a damaging lie. Russiagate sowed doubts about the legitimacy of his presidency and saddled his administration with an official witch hunt headed by Bungling Bob Mueller, a former FBI director. This was sedition.

Columbia University oversees the Pulitzer Prizes. It awarded prizes to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage — promotion — of this lie. President Trump asked Columbia to rescind the prizes in light of Russiagate being proven as a lie — after he left office.

None of the newspapers that brag about winning a Pulitzer stood with Trump in his defense if the truth. Certainly Columbia didn’t.

CNBC reported on July 18, 2022, “The Pulitzer Prize Board on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump’s yearlong campaign for the organization to strip the New York Times and the Washington Post of the awards they received for their reporting on Russian election interference.

“The board made that decision after two separate, independent reviews found that the award-winning reporting on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton stood up to scrutiny.”

The Pulitzer board said in a press release, “No passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

Well, you cannot spell Pulitzer without L-I-E. Instead of doing the honorable thing by yanking those Pulitzers, the university had its Columbia Journalism Review publication publish a lengthy, barely readable review of the press coverage of Russiagate. Jeff Gerth, 79, did the reporting and filed a four-part story running 24,000 words called “The press versus the president.”

It is obvious to anyone who is not driven crazy by the words Donald Trump, the time has come for a reckoning by the press. There will be none. Gerth was brought in to give the appearance of accountability. My first question is who is he? This Los Angeles Times story from December 21, 1985, may shed some light on Gerth.

The story began, “A $522-million libel suit filed over a 1975 Penthouse magazine article alleging organized crime ties to the exclusive La Costa resort has been settled out of court, ending a decade of costly litigation.

“According to the agreement reached between owners of La Costa, in Carlsbad, and Penthouse publisher Robert Guccione, each side will pay for its own legal costs, and that’s all. Costs are estimated to total more than $20 million.”

The article was “La Costa: The Hundred-Million Dollar Resort with Criminal Clientele” by Gerth and Lowell Bergman. I did not read the story at the time. I was too busy reading the bio of cover girl Susan Ryder.

Penthouse paid Gerth and Bergman each $1,500 to write the article — and later paid its lawyers millions.

Bergman went on to fame in television, including a gig on 60 Minutes. He also teaches at UC Berkeley. Al Pacino portrayed him in a movie, and won a Pulitzer for another story he did.

Gerth, too, won a Pulitzer for a story exposing the sale of satellite technology to Red China. If only we treated this threat at the time.

CJR tells us Gerth did 30 years as an investigative reporter for the New York Times in DC. You do not last that long in DC without being connected to the deep state, a body that like the Cosa Nostra, the FBI does not admit exists.

As Chuck Schumer said, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” And they took all six ways to get back at Trump, including an investigation of Russiagate by Bungling Bob Mueller.

Mueller’s work as FBI director was highlighted by his big-footing the FBI investigation of the anthrax case. Letters laced with anthrax were sent to people across the country shortly after 9/11. The letters killed 5 people and sickened 17 others. Within months, the FBI fingered Steven J. Hatfill, an Army biodefense researcher, telling tales of him to the media and calling him a person of interest

Mueller’s team made Hatfill’s life hell. He sued. He won.

The New York Times reported on June 28, 2008, “The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a person of interest in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001.

“The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall.”

The case was never solved. No one was punished. Mueller kept his job. Hatfill was paid off. The taxpayers are out $4.6 million but that will not cover how much the federal government spends over even one coffee break.

Which is why I am not surprised that 15 years later, no one was punished over Russiagate, a seditious libel aimed at undermining — and maybe ending — the administration of a duly elected president, ala the Coup d’Etat against Richard Nixon who was framed by that same intelligence community.

If only Nixon had appointed J. Edgar Hoover’s chosen heir, Mark Felt, as FBI director, none of that would have happened. There was a reason Hoover never went after the Mafia. Professional courtesy.

Gerth’s piece came down to this: “One traditional journalistic standard that wasn’t always followed in the Trump-Russia coverage is the need to report facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative. In January 2018, for example, the New York Times ignored a publicly available document showing that the FBI’s lead investigator didn’t think, after ten months of inquiry into possible Trump-Russia ties, that there was much there. This omission disserved Times readers. The paper says its reporting was thorough and ‘in line with our editorial standards.’”

A more logical conclusion would demand that journalists get new standards because the existing editorial standards allowed the intelligence community to create a cockamamie conspiracy theory that kneecapped a duly elected president, a theory the press promoted. That was the real danger to democracy.

Armin Rosen said, “With Russiagate, the media doesn’t have the excuse of being flummoxed by a complex or nebulous factual record. Thanks to Smith, Lake, Techno Fog, and numerous others whom Gerth ignores, we’ve known for years that the media worked in concert with a political comms firm and elements of federal law enforcement and the intelligence community to peddle an incorrect theory about a secret deal between an enemy of the United States and an American presidential candidate they all didn’t like.”

Cold.

True.

The press won’t sober up and quit libeling people. In an era when the government censors people with false claims of Fake News — an era in which the media cheers the censorship — it is time for freedom-loving Americans to protect the truth from Pulitzered Liars. Florida is leading the way to stop the lies.

Dixon’s story on the attempt in Florida to stop the libel cited state Representative Alex Andrade, a Republican, as the proposal’s sponsor. Dixon summarized the bill as:

1. allowing plaintiffs who sue media outlets for defamation to collect attorneys fees;

2. adding a provision to state law specifying that comments made by anonymous sources are presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits;

3. lowering the legal threshold for a “public figure” to successfully sue for defamation;

4. repealing the “journalist’s privilege” section of state law, which protects journalists from being compelled to do things like reveal the identity of sources in court, for defamation lawsuits.

Let me go over this point-by-point.

No. 1, libel is a product liability. When any other company loses in court, it must pay the plaintiff’s attorneys, usually through the contingency fee. What makes NYT and the rest of the media any different?

No. 2, the Constitution guarantees the right to face one’s accuser.

No. 3, good gravy, media lawyers claimed Kyle Rittenhouse a public figure, which allowed a billion-dollar industry to lie about a kid by calling him a racist, even though the men he shot were white.

No. 4, when you abuse a privilege, you lose it.

DeSantis wants to repair our broken libel laws. We all do. The failure of the press to police itself means the public will through their elected officials.

Now for today’s TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC POLL: