Revoke the media's License to Lie

35 days until our real president returns to office

60 years ago, the liberal Supreme Court in 1965 gave the press a License to Lie in the NYT v. Sullivan case in which the Times ran a libelous ad by civil rights activists against police in Birmingham, Alabama. The court said, well, unless NYT meant actual malice, the libel was not a libel.

Despite this iron wall, President Trump sued George Stephanopoulos and Disney’s ABC for one billion dollars.

According to BBC:

During the 10 March broadcast, Stephanopoulos asked South Carolina Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace how she could endorse Trump.

The anchor falsely said “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape.”

Stephanopoulos repeated the claim 10 times throughout the broadcast.

Rather than make Stephanopoulos face deposition this week, the network agreed on Saturday to pay $15 million to Trump and a million to his lawyers, and make its No. 1 news reader apologize on the air.

After six decades of not being held liable for libel, corporate media knows Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito are itching to overturn Sullivan and revoke that License to Lie. This may save journalism from journalists, who are an unhappy lot right now that the people have restored the Trump presidency.

Fox News reported, “60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl admits worry about future of legacy media: ‘I’m very dark about it.’ ”

The story covered a taped chit-chat between her and Peggy Noonan in which the two dinosaurs bemoaned the tarpit they were sinking in. The Tyrannosaurus Reginas blamed Trump and Elon Musk. But, as Jimmy Buffett sang in Margaritaville, it’s their own damn fault.

Stahl said, “We’re talking about something so essential that you don’t want to say, ‘Well, we’ll see.’ Or maybe, ‘The world will end, we’ll see.’ But if America lost freedom of the press and freedom of speech, it would be the beginning of losing everything.’ ”

Where was she when Twitter banned Trump for life? Where was her ringing defense of free speech? Where now is her stirring cry to release the January 6 protesters just as the Capitol Police have done with every liberal protester?

Freedom of the press has never been more secure than it is today. There is not a single newspaper that is censored. There is not a single book that is banished or banned. States allow schools to stock child porn such as Gender Queer in school libraries.

No, the problem for Stahl the Stegosaurus and Noonan the Pegosaurus is fewer and fewer people are listening to the former or reading the latter because they are mice at a time when we need lionesses. All the journalists have going for them is their mouths and too often are silent when evil strikes.

The mouth of the press did not roar when Jimmy the Weasel Comey let Hillary off with a stern warning instead of recommending prosecution for her multiple national security breaches in which she sent State Secrets to foreign donors to her fake charity when she was Secretary of State.

The Washington Post praised Comey’s cowardice, headlining a news story, “The plain-speaking FBI director: James Comey delivers ‘hard truths.’ ”

His decision came a few days after Bill Clinton confronted Comey’s boss, Loretta Lynch, on a tarmac for a 45-minute chat in the the heat of June in Arizona. The optics were bad because the optics revealed to the whole world that the fix was in. And just maybe Bill meant to do so to show how powerful and inevitable a second Clinton presidency was.

Voters saw it otherwise and denied Hillary the first female presidency, along with it Lynch’s opportunity to become the first black woman on the Supreme Court. That’s speculation on my part, of course. But one way or another, the fix was in.

The mouth failed to roar against this tawdry tarmac trade.

Instead, the mouse fed us fetid cheese.

Typical was this dreck from Time:

In the American system, justice depends not only on judges and juries, Comey said, but also on the decisions of investigators and prosecutors. Law enforcement officials “weigh a number of factors before bringing charges,” he said, and to make those decisions responsibly they must consider “the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.” Normally those calls are made behind the scenes, but Comey said because the case had received “intense public interest” he had decided to lay out why Clinton’s actions didn’t justify prosecution.

Translation, Comey is the cop on the beat who will look the other way for the right price—and no one in the press cared or dared to call him out.

The mouse did not roar when Obama used the FBI to spy on Trump. The press immediately called him a liar. Typical was NPR’s report, “President Trump Accuses Obama Of ‘Wire Tapping,’ Provides No Evidence.”

But bless its heart, ABC let the cat out of the bag that very day by running a story, “Everything you need to know about FISA wiretaps.”

That press knew about the FBI spying on Trump before he did. And the FBI wasn’t simply wiretapping his phone. Obama’s bureau used high tech to listen into every conversation Trump had with anyone in Trump Tower. While the law requires transcripts not to identify any Americans in those conversation, the law does allow the Director of National Intelligence to unmask the name. Obama’s Susan Rice did.

Do you now see why the press and the rest of the Democrats so vehemently oppose Tulsi Gabbard as the next DNI?

The mouth that did not roar about Obama’s Watergate on Steroids also did not roar when the FBI held an early morning raid to arrest Roger Stone and his equally elderly wife over statements he made to the FBI.

Not only was the mouth silent but it participated in this outrageous assault on civility, as CNN was a tagalong filming the raid.

To be sure, the mouth roars all the time when it comes to Trump. The press reported as a scandal his every move in his first term because the news media no longer is independent but chained to the federal government.

ABC reported in 2017, “Trump goes big with White House Christmas, but who pays?”

That’s an odd question to ask the one president who turned down the salary. Volunteers did most of the work.

This was just one of the many examples of the mouth of the press acting like the Boy Who Cried Wolf when Trump did anything. It is annoying but harmless and eventually everyone tunes the boy out.

The real problem is the Boy Who Failed To Cry Grizzly Bear. Scandal after scandal goes through DC undeterred, much like illegal aliens entering via Canada and Mexico.

The mouth did not roar when Twitter banned the New York Post from linking its stories about Hunter Biden—a story the press pretended was not true because it was true and it would have cost FJB the presidency.

Stahl is very dark about the future of the press? Well, it is good that its future is dark. After all, the press gave in to the dark side and now suffers the consequences of that poor choice.

You see, undeterred by Disney’s ABC shelling out $15 million to Trump plus $1 million to his lawyers, the press continues its rampage against the truth.

Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post screamed, “Elon Musk spent $277M backing Trump into the election. He’s $200 billion richer this year.”

Nope. The two are not connected and the $200 billion is a lie because it included $120 billion in compensation a Delaware judge won’t let him have. (See Paragraph 6.)

That leaves him with a 46% increase in paper profits on the value of the half-dozen companies he runs. Stocks overall had a good year. The S&P 500 is up 28%, meaning Don Surber is up 28% thanks to his stock index fund.

I voted for Trump so that explains it all, right?

What a bunch of jamokes at the Bezos Post.

But the Supreme Court, not X, will save journalism. Overturning Sullivan will force journalists to do things like, oh, double-checking their facts and getting at least two sides of the story.