Someone pointed out to me that I agree with Clarence Thomas and Donald Trump and disagree with the man I generally call the estimable Charles Pierce on the question of Sullivan v. New York Times.
Well, not really. I don't think any of them have a full or realistic view of the consequences of the Warren Court allowing the media to lie with impunity against "public figures" by forcing those they slander and libel to prove their mental state and motives in lying about them. I don't think the results of making media open to lawsuits on the basis of the falseness of the lies it spreads would benefit Trump or Thomas, I think liberals would be the beneficiaries of returning to a pre-Sullivan condition.
I look at who the media lies about the most effectively, liberals, the actual kind of liberals who used to be elected from around the country and who, in the very period when Sullivan was chiseled in baloney who in one week in 1965 adopted Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act, pretty much the same congress which a year before had produced the Civil Rights Act. The same congress which produced the high point of American liberalism and who the Supreme Court enabled the enemies of all of those to lie about with impunity. It's been pretty well down hill all the way under that regime of enabled, protected lying by the media. The very thing which produced the Nixon and Reagan administrations, the Bush I administration, the illegitimate regimes of Bush II and Trump. Oh, yes, and with those criminal regimes and administrations, the Warren Court has been being disappeared in the law as their Supreme Court appointments have taken over as the cabloid machine, first CNN and then the full strength version of it, FOX have lied and propagandized the country into fascist dominance.
I think that Charlie Piece is blinded to the actual character of that permission to lie because, frankly, it is in his financial and expressive interest to not have to worry about being sued. I think that economic motive and the convenience of not having to fact-check what they want to say is the reason the Sullivan decision is so popular with even liberal writers who, if they really considered the results of it, would see it has enabled the regime of lies that created that Republican ascendancy. I think it is also, to an extent, the hold-over of habits developed in the anti-anti-commie period when, to oppose the domestic fascists who mounted the red scare and HUAC they developed a "First Amendment" knee jerk that has largely and unsurprisingly been most useful to those with the most money who own the media or who buy it so they can turn it into their political tools - and, coincidentally, for whom many of those "liberals" work. I might like some journalists but I'm not going to pretend they are not prone to self-interested fits of unreality and even resorting to post-truth blather.
Lefties, of whom I would certainly be considered one, have always suffered from the same anti-anti-commie disease that disables the thinking of liberals, even worse. The delusion of the American left that all they needed to do was make their case and the masses would flock to them has been disproved by a century of such delusion and, let me break this to you, one Bernie, no, not even one AOC means it's springtime for the great Socialist revolution. Even if Ocasio-Cortez is as good at social media as she seems, and I do have enormous respect for her, the Sullivan freed lie machine will chew her up and spit her out. Repetition of even the most outrageous lies will sink the best of us. I've seen that happen to virtually every promising liberal since the 60s. They did it to McGovern, a war hero and one of the most decent men to have gotten a nomination, they did it to John Kerry with purple bandaids, they did it to the great Jimmy Carter. I haven't done the actual research but I will bet you that the media, freed by the Sullivan ruling, lied with greater abandon about the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. after they were freed than before the ruling was set down, preparing the way for his assassination as certainly as Trump inspired the latest would-be assassin with his lying. Given the origin of the case, that would be the cruelest of the ironies involved in this. The media, freed of responsibilities by that ruling and by the destruction of the Fairness Doctrine, public service requirements, etc. has become almost entirely a corporate-fascist lie machine. All thanks to the miracle of "free speech absolutism" "freedom of the press" and the abandonment of the hard fact that a People fed lies cannot have an egalitarian democracy or a decent life.
The real life history of lying in the United States that has produced Trumpian post-truth is a product of the "free speech-free press" rulings of the Supreme Court starting with Sullivan. It is the real life experiment that allows us to know what allowing lies free reign will produce. Remember that as you listen to the lies issuing from the Trump regime and congressional Republicans and CNN and FOX, etc. Remember that the next time the New York Times prints that Hillary Clinton or, maybe, AOC is about to be indicted. Right before an election.
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