Notes on This Mornings Post.

When I began this post I typed that the basic facts around the Sullivan decision were ironic in view of the result it has produced.  But I don't think irony covers the facts of the case and the decision as they became manifest in the past fifty years.

The decision used the clearly political and racist decisions of Alabama courts in lawsuits brought by public officials criticized in an advertisement placed in
The New York Times by members of the civil rights community.  They were appealing for funds to defend The Reverend Martin Luther King jr* from some pretty outrageous charges.   At the time the ruling, including its blanket permission of lies told about public officials was hailed as a great step for the civil rights struggle, while it was merely a permission for the media to lie about politicians and, eventually, others.   That the decision permitted the intentional lies of far-right media and their wealthy owners and benefactors seems, somehow, to get left out of that consideration.

As it turned out, that ruling, mixed with others promoted by the ACLU, other parts of the "civil liberties" industry and media companies and corporations which often hired them, played out, mostly, to the benefit of the wealthy, who owned or could buy up media, target their economic and political rivals on the left and use the media to totally discredit the very left and, indeed, the civil rights struggle that were the alleged beneficiaries of the ruling.  It worked out much better for The New York Times than it did the civil rights struggle.  As part of Nixon's misnamed "Southern Strategy"  the political plan made by amoral politicians, appealing to racists to the benefit of the Republican Party, the party of those wealthy beneficiaries. who promoted racists and the racism they advocated for their own economic benefit were probably those who benefited the most from being allowed to lie with impunity.

Further rulings of the "civil liberties" sort benefiting  the pornography industry facilitated the importation of an Australian-Brit porn merchant, facilitating his taking out citizenship during the Reagan years (direct beneficiaries of the new found freedom of the media to lie) so he could buy media companies here and do what he did in Australia and Britain for their far right.   I wonder if the old laws against pornography would have possibly kept him out as an undesirable alien or someone who should not be allowed to own major parts of the American broadcast and cabloid media.   It is Rupert Murdoch, using the "civil liberties" and free-press, free speech regime which has done so much to sell lies that have been politically potent as well as a model for other media companies in the United States.  Fascist, hate-talk radio is a direct product of the free-speech, free-press rulings of liberal courts of the past, brought by the civil liberties industry, generally on behalf of media organizations**.

For some reason, after seeing a half century of that developing, those are still mistaken as some kind of flower of liberalism though it has nothing to do with the genuine tradition of liberalism in which people are not objects of commerce and commodities but are all equally endowed with rights and moral responsibilities and that lies are evil and dangerous and can be counted on to produce bad results.

The proof of that is the neo-confederates who now control the congress and the very Supreme Court itself and which could, in two short years, control the entire government.  As I said, the results of the experiment are in and those are conclusive and absolute.   The free speech industry has brought us rule by the neo-confederates.  It could have certainly been different if those rulings and that advocacy had been different but it hasn't been.  Why it wasn't done that way is worth thinking very hard about, though not nearly as worth thinking about as how to get out of this disaster.

* The ad contained some minor misstatements of facts which opened the door for lawsuits by individuals named in the advertisement.  The whole thing could have been avoided by The Times running a correction of the errors in the ad - not to mention by those who placed it and those who accepted it fact checking it, something The Times and reputable newspapers used to be in the business of doing back then, as I recall. The Times was, in fact requested to run a retraction of actual errors by Montgomery Public Safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, who maintained he was covered in statements made which included his department. Instead of doing that, The Times wrote him a letter instead of the retraction which could have short-circuited the entire case.  The Times must have been advised they could have avoided the lawsuit by a printed retraction, if their not doing that was more than mere hubris, I don't know.

Instead of dealing with it that way, issuing a requirement for a retraction of the false statements and doing what the courts have never had a problem of doing, reducing damages to a dollar if not less, the justices enshrined lies as an emblem of free speech.

**  The total cynicism of the Murdoch empire is shown in how, even as its "news" division promotes the creationist-fundamentalist, frequently racist, heresy of pseudo-Christianity, its entertainment arm promotes neo-atheism according to Seth MacFarlane.  I don't think that is, actually, ironic in that I see them as being merely different flavors of materialism, the crassly vulgar and the more pretentious sides of it.  Together, the neo-atheists and the pseudo-Christians make a very convincing Anti-Christ.  That none of that is of benefit to the people on whose behalf The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. struggled, suffered and died is what I'd call evidence that the rejection of his concept of morality leads to predictable results.   I don't know how he saw the Sullivan decision at the time but I suspect he would have noted the results in the politics of the period after that and would have, in any case, not believed that the legalization of lies could have resulted in anything else.  It was the lies of the same neo-confederates and wealth that made his struggle necessary, after all.