WELL, PEOPLE DO. Who else is there to do it? If the assertion is that discerning the truth from a lie isn't always easy the rational conclusion to that isn't to give up and just let professional liars lie with all the rights and privileges claimed by professional liars within the profession of journalism in the mass media, peddling those lies with the deceptive tactics of the PR and advertising industries. ITS TO PUT THE RESPONSIBILITY TO FACT CHECK ON THE ONES WHO WANT TO SAY THINGS ON THE MASS MEDIA, TO MAKE MONEY FROM WHAT THEY SAY AND GET PAID TO DO IT.
People don't drive perfectly or responsibly all the time, there are car accidents, people get killed, people get injured, for life sometimes. You don't deal with that by doing away with all laws and regulations to prevent car accidents, you have laws putting the responsibility for driving safely on the driver. AND YOU MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THOSE THEY INJURE TO SUE NEGLIGENT OR IRRESPONSIBLE DRIVERS. If there is a court case to decide guilt or responsibility, people make that decision. There's nothing odd or unusual about it. If it's OK to do it in this case, to trust the legal system in that, why isn't it OK when it's an often more obvious case of someone lying? That judges, "justices" and lawyers suddenly want to claim that courts and juries and judges are too stupid to tell the difference between a lie and the truth impeaches their entire profession and their reason for getting paid.
It used to be possible for public figures to sue liars in the media for some personal injuries caused by the lies they spread but the idiocy of the First Amendment stupidly asserts that there are to be no laws made to punish those who lie in the most dangerous way, potentially harming individuals or even entire groups of people. And the line of "free speech-free press" Supreme Court rulings from the past century till today have made what was previously bad far worse. Those who the "liberals" on the Supreme Court freed to lie with impunity naturally chose to tell their most profitable lies against Democrats. That those who were most effective at lying were wealthy owners of media and their advertisers, that was something only a stunned idiot without a clue about real life wouldn't have seen would be the result. Such as the members of the Supreme Court so often are.
This has reached crisis stage in which the lies spread by the entire range of media from the gutter-tabloid-cabloid-FOX level right to those held in most esteem like the New York Times and NPR are driving us into fascism. We either take the low risks of injustices against those who may make an ambiguous statement and get punished for what might not technically be called a lie or we have a government by gangsters such as the one Nixon tried to set up and which all of the Republican-fascists with the fewest of exceptions still are in on. There will be no freedom to tell the truth under what "free speech" absolutism is bringing us to. You won't get to tell the hardest truths in the venues where it matters most, in the mass media.
And I make those exceptions without really seeing how anyone who stays in that party after Trump and his crimes and the insurrection WHICH A MAJORITY OF REPUBLICANS SUPPORTS TODAY can be said to be innocent of it. If Liz Cheney really meant what she says she would leave that party, so would the others who voted to hold Trump responsible for the insurrection and those who speak against him. If that's their view, it's really not ever going to be their kind of Republican Party ever again and they shouldn't prop it up at all.
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