I WOULD BE FASCINATED to know if there is a long and involved discussion among Constitutional and legal scholars along the centuries as to whether or not the First Amendment does, actually assert there is a right to lie, that telling lies does, in fact, have the same legal status as telling the truth under that document. If anyone knows of an estimable discussion of that issue in the 19th and 20th centuries or earlier I would very much like to read it, one made by the kind of scholars and lawyers and judges and "justices" who get quoted as if their ancient opinion had the status of revealed truth only, under the Constitution, far more actual potency than revealed truth.
I'm actually thinking there might not be that kind of long, involved record of legal debate and discussion of that issue because I don't think "the law" is much interested in truth. I have come to believe that as that Edwin Armstrong quote I've used before said, "Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words." Doing that is so much more conducive to having an illustrious career in academia and the law than the truth is. I would guess that lying will get you a lot farther in most of the big law firms and in law schools, too. The lies told during their confirmations by the members of the Supreme Court certainly prove those come with no cost to them. There's really no percentage for them in bringing the subject up.
Telling the truth is a far different matter than lying. It's a lot harder to tell the truth, the truth must be confined to representing what really happened, what was really said, what actions were really taken. The truth has to stick to that as closely as the person telling it can get or it isn't the truth anymore, it's a mistake or a misunderstanding and the results, no matter how sincerely believed or modestly expressed, or innocently told with a desire to tell the truth will not be the truth. The truth will very often NOT be something the person telling it would want it to be, sometimes it is very much something that they really don't want to be real or to have other people find out about. And often telling the truth is the end process of a difficult discovery and testing and the results often almost as hard to explain as the process of discovery was.
Not lies. To be effective, to have real world power and potency all a lie has to be is plausible to the people who are told the lie or, in that way which I discovered through many online interactions with people unedited, unfiltered, uninhibited, it merely has to support their preexisting prejudices and preferences.
If the lie is outrageously entertaining in the way of FOX and cabloid and tabloid lying, and "reality TV" its potency is empowered by its entertainment value. The gaudier the lie, the more practiced and calculated to gull or encourage or cajole the more studiously constructed, not in the way of fact finding or fact testing but with the sales tactics of the advertising and entertainment industries, the more successful it will be.
FOX is certainly a success because of all of that even as we now know that its biggest faces were lying as journalism on the day of January 6th, as the Trump Republican-fascist insurrection was going on and in its aftermath. Brian Kilmeade, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannities words to Mark Meadows have now been put into the Congressional and public records and we know beyond any reasonable doubt that every word they said contrary to their own, unedited, unfiltered, direct communications as that attack on American electoral democracy was happening is a big fat lie.
My question, though is for those big fat First Amendment absolutists out there. Are Kilmeade, Ingraham and Hannity journalists? Is what they do journalism as covered by the First Amendment's privileges granted to "the press"? Are their lies protected speech for every and all purposes?
Would, if they were prosecuted as a consequence of what they lied on FOX or merely investigated criminally get the same knee-jerk reaction from the big organs of free-pressyness expressing their outrage as seen last week when the Putin-Trump asset Julian Assange was said to be eligible for extradition to face trial in the United States as he most certainly did not practice journalism by dumping raw, stolen intelligence into the public record, not fact checking, not checking to see if any of it might get people killed, not having the slightest interest in its veracity only in whether or not it might tip the American election for Trump and against Hillary Clinton?
Because the big fat "press freedom" and "journalist's protection" outfits saw fit to make that scum-ball gangster and Putin-Trump asset into an honorary "journalist" with all rights and privileges they deem theirs because "The First Amendment" and some international statements of the same kind even though he really is more like a gang stoolie or a small time racketeer who plants a lie in the gutter press for his own or the benefit of his crime bosses. I should mention that under the "it's being said" tactic of even venues as august as the New York Times and NPR will spew similar lies because they want to be "even-handed" and "non-partisan." In case anyone thought I was restricting the category of "gutter press" to the officially declassee.
If the First Congress which wrote and began the adoption of the so-called Bill of Rights really did intend to give lies told the same status as truth, they were, in fact, privileging lies over the truth because lies have a far, far easier time in the world than the truth does, in so far as human action and the catastrophic past of human history proves.
The only advantage the truth has is that eventually the consequences of the lies will tend to make the hard, often unpleasant, frequently unwelcomed truth look far better in retrospect, though that is little comfort as the damage of the lies has already had its sway and its malignant effects spread even after it has been refuted. And the human ability to retain the hardest of truths is a fragile thing as we can see in the rise of scinetific racism, eugenics and neo-Nazism as the WWII generation dies away completely and as those lies are financed internationally by billioniare gangsters like Putin and various mid-eastern oil billionaires, many in the United States and elsewhere in the once Allied world. If the world experience of the Second World War, the genocides of the Nazis, the Italian fascists, the Imperial Japanese side, the losses from battles and bombings, those who incidentally died from it and the even larger number of those who mourned them and suffered is not enough to bury Nazism and scientific racism of even two generations, no one should depend on the hard lessons of history to disempower the big lies that were the basis of all of those crimes and, so prevent their further potency. We are fools for not totally suppressing Nazism on the basis of "The First Amendment" which is, actually, proof that the First Congress WAS THAT STUPID, perhaps many of them being interested in the violent holding of slaves and the genocides and theft of lands to the West, that shouldn't surprise us.
We have no excuse because we are witness to the subsequent history of making such "rights" absolute with no attached responsibilities to tell the truth. We let this continue, we share in all of the blame for all of the results.
The time for relying on Supeme Courts which frequently have motives and desires, prejudices and predilictions as sordid as the worst of the liars of the past to protect us from the monumentally irresponsible failure of those who framed the First and the other Amendments in the so-called Bill of Rights and make it explicit within the text that the freedoms granted to individuals and, far more dangerously, "the press" do not cover lies, not the ones they tell in innocent gullibility or the ones that are told on purpose for the most criminal and evil of motives.
If the MSNBCs and CNN's, the old network news operations, the print media, big and small and the various radio and online networks and forces do not promote the legal and Constitutional distinction between the absolute right and moral duty to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie that any law or Constitution should never pretend there is, they are all in on the Große Lüge that all of that is perfectly OK because figuring out what's true and what's a lie is hard and takes a lot of work and might interfere with the time requirements of filling up dead air time and, if their competitors get their scoop first (true or false), they'll fall behind in the ratings, and, besides, the advertisers won't like it.
The old and long gone Media Whores Online was reputedly started and written by someone who had been in journalism. I used to get into discussions there - it was my first experience of posting any words online. I had the feeling that the things I said along this line made the owner of it and others there uncomfortable because if there is a thought crime to be committed in the United States it is to assert that the media, the mass media, in particular, have no right to anything without the responsibility that they provide The People with the TRUTH that they need to cast an informed vote. Back then I was still callow enough in an American liberal Bill of Rights enlightenment way to think that them telling the truth was enough to sway a majority of voters - since then I have come to understand that even more it requires that that effective majority have a full and effective belief and desire to be of good will, to have a stronger sense of the morality of the Golden Rule than makes the college-credentialed feel easy and, certainly would make the cynics in the legal and journalistic professions pretend-gag for the amusement of their fellow cynics.
But making the distinction between the absolute right and duty to tell the truth and the fact that there is no right to lie is a place to start. That might be more morality than the college-credentialed can take at one time.
The question is there: Are The Now Exposed FOX Liars, Kilmeade, Intraham and Hannity Journalists With All Rights And Privileges Granted To Those In That Club Due Them?
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