Bacon: He definitely did, but I’m not sure what the offense taken is.… The thing I wanted to come back to—Ana mentioned smaller outlets. Let’s talk about the big outlets first, though. Trump forced or coerced or weakened debate, as you said. Disney and CBS already reached, you know, agreements in these defamation suits with him.
The Wall Street Journal and the Times are now facing these defamation suits. These are very big institutions that sort of define the American media in a certain way. So, professor, to start with you, how worried should we be that he’s suing the biggest news organizations in the country, the ones that still at this point deliver a lot of the breaking news and investigations in the country.
Ford: I think it’s worrisome. I think it’s a tactic to silence the press and intimidate the press into some type of pulling back on a kind of robust, uninhibited debate, public debate, and in their coverage of the administration. That’s the goal. The truth of the matter is that in all these defamation lawsuits that we’ve seen, experts say time and time again that these suits—that he’s unlikely to win, right? Very, very unlikely to win. And the reason is because the First Amendment provides robust protection for the press, for all of us, to make errors when we are speaking about matters that involve public officials and public figures. This was set in the New York Times v. Sullivan case in 1964.
It came out of, interestingly, a Civil Rights Era case, in which white elites in the South sued The New York Times for errors in a in a civil rights ad, saying We’ve been defamed, we’ve been defamed. It was hard to defame them, of course, for what they were doing as white supremacists.
And yet they were trying to use libel law as a tool to silence the press. And the Supreme Court at that time said, No, you know, if the First Amendment means anything, it means that we have to allow some degree of error in public speech, particularly about people who are public officials.
And that went on then to include public figures down the road in further cases. But it’s just such an important principle. So the actual malice standard says you are protected; these institutions are protected for errors, even if they’re defamatory, if these errors are made without knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. And most professional journalists, journalists and news institutions, don’t go recklessly around making errors, right? And they don’t have reckless disregard for the truth. That’s not true of all news institutions or of all people. But it does tend to be true.
And so what we know is that the Supreme Court very recently has turned down an opportunity to revisit the actual malice standard in a case. We think it’s very, very robust protection still. And so, my expectation and hope, profound hope, is that The New York Times is going to see this through.
And I hope Murdoch for The Wall Street Journal sees it through.
