Bad Courts

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Archives: Mon.2.16.2004 Fri.2.13.2004 Wed.2.11.2004 Mon.2.9.2004 Fri.2.6.2004 Wed.2.4.2004 Mon.2.2.2004 Fri.1.30.2004 Wed.1.28.2004 Mon.1.26.2004 Fri.1.23.2004 Wed.1.21.2004 Mon.1.19.2004 Bad Courts Years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court in effect legalized pornography, I predicted that the decision would result in the corruption of the whole culture. And so it has.

The reasoning is obvious. If pornography is legal, then everything short of pornography is also legal. As I wrote at the time, the problem would not be the porno shop in a sleazy part of town. The problem would be the profanity and vulgarity that would find its way into mainstream publications and entertainment.

So if you want to blame somebody for the Janet Jackson Super Bowl stunt, blame the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is also responsible for the flagrant abuses of tabloid journalism, abuses that have leaked into the so-called mainstream press.

When I was a young reporter, there was only one defense against a charge of libel: the truth. Before you accused anyone of any wrongdoing, you had to have evidence that would stand up in court. Even if you "knew" the party was guilty, if you couldn't prove it, then you wrote nothing.

During the 1960s, however, the Supreme Court changed the rules. The so-called Sullivan rule set up two unequal classes of people: public figures and private people. The old rule, that the only defense against libel was the truth, still applied to private people. However, if you were a public figure, you had to prove not only that the libelous statement was false, but also that it was published with malice. Since malice is a state of mind, that is very difficult to do.

This one Supreme Court decision — which has, like so many of the court's decision, no basis in the Constitution — ushered in what I call the era of cheap-shot journalism. Now you could, if dealing with a public figure, print an accusation or an innuendo and then just shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, gee, I thought it was true."

This made it open season on celebrities and public officials. It is one reason, I believe, that it has become increasingly difficult to persuade decent and honest people to run for public office. They know their privacy can be invaded and that they can be pilloried by the press with no real recourse.

The ruling has also had a corrupting influence on journalism. Newspaper lawyers always claim that repeal of the Sullivan rule would have a "chilling effect" on journalists, but the truth is that the greatest examples of investigative reporting all occurred prior to the Sullivan rule. Since I worked in the pre-Sullivan era, I can tell you it had no chilling effect on me, but it did make me a careful reporter. I did a good many so-called exposé-type stories, but I never, ever wrote a story that relied on an source."

A final bad court decision was the one-man, one-vote ruling. That was a clear violation of the spirit of the Constitution. The principle embodied in that document was one of checks and balances. The U.S. House is elected on the basis of population, but each state has two senators, regardless of its population.

Prior to the interference of federal courts, most states followed that principle, so that thinly populated rural areas could counterbalance the big cities. One-man, one-vote rule transferred political power directly to the cities and urban areas, and I believe that state government has suffered much as a result.

Our mistake was to ever allow courts to legislate using the flimsy excuse of interpretations of the Constitution and the law — interpretations that are absurd. This legislating by the courts is what George Washington called usurpation of power, and he warned that it would have a destructive effect on the union.

A great many more impeachments would have a salutary effect on judges and justices with delusions of being superlegislators unanswerable to the people and anointed by God to run the whole country.

2 posted on 02/16/2004 6:58:18 AM PST by King Black Robe (With freedom of religion and speech now abridged, it is time to go after the press.)

If every journalist would refer to the Justices who passed these decisions by name instead of referring to them as "The Supreme Court" or "The 9th Circuit Court" we'd have someone to focus on. Maybe, just maybe, they'd be more thoughtful in their considerations.

If the Supreme Court had ruled the way the author wishes in the Sullivan case, there would be no FreeRepublic or Drudge Report (or Democratic Underground for that matter).

I'm not familiar with a court case mandating equal sized Sentate districts. In fact some states go by county, I'm pretty sure.

Also, the sentence that ends with "an source" seems truncated. An anonymous source? A single source? A poor source?

I think Reese, who seems to be pretty cranky on a good day, must have been having a bad day when he wrote this. I think the missing word probably is supposed to be "anonymous," and it is missing in his online column so the mistake is not the fault of a bad rewrite by the poster. In this column Reese just threw a bunch of stuff he didn't like against the wall, and whatever stuck there he blamed on the Supreme Court.

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