“They can be used as means of defamation. No one has a right to do this. It is a sin and it is hurtful.”
This is a passage that is buried in what Pope Francis said the other day about the destructive evil that lying by the media is. What most people in the media are focused on is his analogy to people who have an obsessive fascination with shit but they are missing his point, that lying in the media, media carrying lies has a real effect in the real world and that it is wrong AND NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO DO IT.
That certainly means that the permission to lie that has been the law of the land in the United States for the past half century is not a right, it is a permission given by the Supreme Court justices who issued the rulings doing that. The focus has been on the real evil that comes from lies that gain currency in social media but just about all of the media, from the top down, engage in lying or in carrying lies in the United States. It was the New York Times that first got the permission to lie with impunity, not the National Enquirer.
There is no right to lie, to defame people, those lies enabled by the Supreme Court came at a cost to the real rights people have to not be lied about.
I'm going to repeat that. By permitting the media to lie with impunity, the Supreme Court gave a privilege to liars that came at the expense of those who are lied about who lost their right to not be lied about.
That might seem a slight thing to lawyers, few of whom had any practical experience in politics or who belonged to the class of people or in a line of work who can be easily destroyed by the media carrying lies about them but the consequences in our politics and in the corruption of society and life in the United States has been devastating.
The faster people have these realities pointed out to them, the faster they will get over the brainwashing by slogans engaged in by the lawyers and judges and media beneficiaries of the permission to lie. The truth should be what is privileged, not lies. But it was the idiocy of the Warren and subsequent courts that they turned that around and privileged lies and the lying liars who tell them. If the justices on the court couldn't understand that their reading of the absurdly and badly misphrased First Amendment would have a devastating impact as people were sold skillfully told lies that would effect their voting choices, that only proves that allowing judges to do that was unwise in the extreme. The media should have an absolute permission to tell the truth, they should never have been given a privilege to lie with impunity.
Pope Francis proves that the view of reality he practices is more realistic than that which the American legal establishment, the judiciary, the Supreme Court and the large majority of those in the media practice. I would say that it is directly related to those different frames of reality written about by Walter Brueggemann. The difference is between the covenental- historical model of monotheism as opposed to the modern-scientific-industrial model which is derived from 18th century materialism. It is certain that giving a permission to lie is entirely incompatible with the first and it is obvious that the second is the framing that led to the permission to lie which has had such a devastating effect on us. It is entirely absurd that we have, again, twice since the turn of the century, permitted a person of such appalling character to assume the presidency he won through lies though he actually lost the vote. Only our 18th century "enlightenment" Constitution prevents us from doing anything about it or anything to prevent it.
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