Abolish the Wire Services

Today a caller meekly asked if there were any way around the New York Times v. Sullivan decision. Rush said he wished there were, but he didn’t think so. I have a much more optimistic take, and I messaged him thusly:

NYT v. Sullivan said that 1A denigrated the right of officials to sue for libel. SCALIA said that was WRONG.
What Scalia said was that the Bill of Rights was not enacted to change anything at all.
It was created NOT to change any right but to set in concrete the established rights of the people. That is explicitly the burden of Ninth Amendment.
And where 1A refers to “the” freedom . . . of the press it explicitly means that freedom of the press AS IT EXISTED IN 1787 cannot be changed.
BUT EXISTING FREEDOM OF THE PRESS DID NOT INCLUDE FREEDOM TO LIBEL (or to print pornography).
So altho the Warren Court asserted that the First Amendment required that officials and judges not be allowed to sue for libel, THAT COULD NOT BE TRUE.
To make the case they asserted, they would have had to refer back to PRECEDENTS PRIOR TO THE CONSTITUTION for their source. And that they did not do.
Other flaws in SULLIVAN include the fact that

Major journalism is a cartel (the words, “Associated Press” alone should tell anyone that).

That cartel has redefined the words “liberal” AND “objective” to mean “in perfect accord with the perspective of the journalism cartel.” The USAGE of those words is, per the cartel, strictly that journalists are never to be called “liberal,” and politicians are never called “objective.” Also, per the cartel, the definition and usage I have articulated must be denied. Even if no more plausibly than the claim that a pitcher didn’t intend to hit a batter with a pitch.

Consequently “liberal” officials never get libeled - and “conservative” ones routinely do. Denigrating the rights of public officials to sue for libel is, in practice, denigrating the rights of CONSERVATIVE officials AND THIER ADHERENTS to vindicate their reputations BY ESTABLISHING FACTS in a court of law.

This gives “liberals and objective journalists” the right not only to their own opinions, BUT TO THEIR OWN FACTS. And that is Political Correctness. The Warren Court never saw the open politically correct journalism which is now routine, and it is possible to believe that even Earl Warren would have balked at reifying THAT.

No one now disputes that MORRISON V. OLSON was wrongly decided. Yet absent Scalia’s classic dissent, MORRISON would have been unanimous.
In 1964 the SULLIVAN decision was unanimous. But then, the Warren Court didn’t have Antonin Scalia on the bench - and SULLIVAN is just as wrong as MORRISON is.

IMHO

If a poll was ever conducted with the question “Is our two party system working” ? Would the response would be 90% negative.

Our system "isn’t working” precisely because of the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision and its interpretation. The 1964 Sullivan decision asserted that it would be a violation of the First Amendment for a judge or political official to be allowed to sue for libel.
That Warren Court decision was unanimous, with enthusiastic concurrences. But then, absent the vote of then-freshman Justice Scalia, Morrison v. Olson would’ve been unanimous, too - and nobody now thinks Morrison would be upheld if tested. Because Scalia’s dissent was promptly vindicated by history.
Fundamentally, there are at least two flaws in the use of Sullivan as precedent. Not the least of which is that it cannot be correct as a legal principle. Stay with me here:
The entire Bill of Rights was crafted to ensure that - aside from the explicit changes explicit in the text of the Constitution - there would be no change in the rights of the people or of the states. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments make that explicit:

Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Second Amendment echoes that by explicitly referring to “the right of the people” independent of the Constitution - and so, in its way, does the First Amendment. Because 1A does not simply refer to “freedom . . . of the press - it refers to the freedom . . . of the press - freedom as it existed before the Constitution itself was ratified. Ever wonder why the First Amendment didn’t eliminate libel and slander laws, and didn’t eliminate pornography laws? There’s your answer.
The right to sue for libel or slander preexisted the Constitution, and neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights touched that right. In reality, an appeal to the First Amendment is no different from an appeal to the Ninth Amendment - it can only be adjudicated by reference to American common law. Not by simply saying, “freedom of the press.” The above analysis was articulated by Antonin Scalia.
Another reason that Sullivan is not generally applicable is that the history of “the media” since 1964 has made it painfully obvious that national “MSM” journalism is a cartel. “People of the same trade seldom meet together", Adam Smith asserted, "even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” And the wire services, especially the Associated Press, have been continuous virtual meetings of all major journalism which have been ongoing since before the Civil War. To assume that the members/subscribers of the wire services do not “conspire again the public” is therefore a manifestation of naiveté.
The “conspiracy against the public” by the journalism cartel is the propaganda campaign to the effect that journalists are objective - and that journalists express the public interest. Journalists are not objective, journalists are biased in favor of reporting bad news - that is not a matter of dispute. Journalism is negative towards society, and thus systematically suggests the need for more government. And actually trying to be objective is hard work - and no guarantee of getting along with the cartel. What guarantees getting along with the journalism cartel? Why, going along with the rest of the cartel, of course.
Nothing in the Sullivan case raised any inkling of the existence of that cartel. Let alone the fact that it politically homogenizes journalism. In the Sullivan case the plaintiff was not a Republican, but a Southern Democrat in bad odor in liberal circles. But de facto, the journalism cartel defines “liberalism” as “going along and getting along with the journalism cartel” - and defines “objective” the same way. Of course, the cartel insists on difference usages for the two “synonyms” - “liberal” is never to be applied to any journalist - and “objective" always is.
The upshot is that Democrats - who go along assiduously with the journalism cartel - get along perfectly with it, and are never libeled. And that Democrats’ opponents are routinely libeled. A decision that politicians cannot sue for libel is therefore a decision that Republicans cannot sue for libel. A decision that Republicans cannot sue for libel is a decision that Democrats are entitled not only to their own opinions but to their own facts.
And we wonder where “political correctness” comes from!

Scalia argued his view on “textualism” was the ultimate defense of the First Amendment. In March 2012, an Associated Press report said he told an audience at Wesleyan University that the Court’s early justices would be “astonished that the notion of the Constitution changes to mean whatever each successive generation would like it to mean. … In fact, it would be not much use to have a First Amendment, for example, if the freedom of speech included only what some future generation wanted it to include. That would guarantee nothing at all.” That opinion didn’t prevent Scalia from harsh criticism of what is widely viewed as one of the essential court rulings protecting free speech and a free press — the 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. At the Newseum in the Aspen Institute 2011 Washington Ideas Forum, Scalia said the landmark ruling meant “you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not. “Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia said. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’” But in Times v. Sullivan, Scalia said the Supreme Court, under Justice Earl Warren, “… simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.’”
JUSTICE SCALIA: THE 45 WORDS — AND ORIGINAL MEANING — OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

“you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not.” There is something to be said for that approach, assuming that an inadvertent libel originating in excessive trust of a “reliable” source can ordinarily be apologized for amicably. But the rub comes in when the source you rely on is the journalism cartel. The journalism cartel’s faux probative value would have to be litigated away to make that dispensation valid.

And the rub comes in when you rely on someone’s “recovered” (read, synthesized by a psychoanalyst) memory. No court should ever hear a “recovered” memory; recovered memories are synthesized by a process which would be inadmissible in court but which is shielded from an opposing lawyer’s challenge by HIPPA. Understand, a “recovered” memory is a memory - in the sense that the “rememberer” sincerely cannot distinguish the memory from a valid, probative memory. Which simply makes the “rememberer” a devastatingly effective “witness" of something that person never actually experienced.

My analysis is that

Journalism is about news. Bad news. Bad news which reflects poorly on society. The word “gospel” actually means good news - and the gospel is two thousand years old. Good things typically are openly planned; someone decides to build a house, and successfully completes it without much notice. Let that same house burn down, tho - and that is unplanned (and bad), and the public takes notice. On any given weekday, many scores of millions of Americans may get up in the morning with purpose, go to work and have their worth validated, and safely return home without public notice. The opposite - unemployment, dissatisfaction, labor strife - makes news.
News which reflects poorly on society naturally suggests that “there oughta be a law.” It is inherently pro-big government, and thus inherently grist for socialist propaganda.
The wire services created, and sustain, virtual meetings of all major US journalists. Back in 1776 Adam Smith noted that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." It follows that you have to be naive as a babe to assume that the entirety of major journalism can have been continually meeting, virtually, for a century and a half without having long since creating “a conspiracy against the public.” Journalism is dominated by a cartel.
A conspiracy against the public by journalists would, logically, entail a self-serving propaganda campaign. You know, such as, “Journalists are objective.”
“Journalists are objective” is a logical fallacy, in that objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being.
Worse, “Journalists are objective” tells journalists not to venture into territory in which their objectivity would be likely to be challenged. And the way to assure that is to be certain that you are going along with all other journalists, and therefore will get along with all other journalists.
Since “Journalists are objective”, is a fallacy, the propaganda campaign to that effect actually redefines the word “objective” to mean “in accord with the journalism cartel consensus.” Not only so, but the journalist cartel has also redefined other words to the same effect. A century ago “liberal” meant “in accord with the thinking of Jim Robinson, now it means the same as journalism’s ersatz definition of “objective.” The same can be said about “progressive,” “moderate,” “centrist” - just about any political virtue you can name.
The only difference in the cartel-induced meaning of any of those words lies in their usage. “Objective” is to be applied, exclusively and always, to working journalists. Whereas any of the other virtue-signaling words can be applied to any non-journalist who goes along with and therefore gets along with the journalism cartel, but are never applied to any working journalist.
In sum, journalists are “liberals” in everything but name, and they are united by the “conspiracy” naturally flowing from the wire services. Given the tremendous difference in the cost of telegraphy bandwidth from the Nineteenth Century to the Internet Age, and the fact that the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 after the founding of the first wire services, if the wire services didn’t exist you couldn’t get permission from the government to create them. They should be sued into oblivion.
Since journalists are “liberals” in everything but name, journalists never libel “liberals,” but they libel conservatives consistently and mercilessly. This means that the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision - which generally prevents government officials from suing for libel - actually prevents conservatives from suing for libel. Conservatives are forced to seek redress in the teeth of that unanimous Warren Court decision. Justice Scalia points the way:
Scalia argued his view on “textualism” was the ultimate defense of the First Amendment. In March 2012, an Associated Press report said he told an audience at Wesleyan University that the Court’s early justices would be “astonished that the notion of the Constitution changes to mean whatever each successive generation would like it to mean. … In fact, it would be not much use to have a First Amendment, for example, if the freedom of speech included only what some future generation wanted it to include. That would guarantee nothing at all.” That opinion didn’t prevent Scalia from harsh criticism of what is widely viewed as one of the essential court rulings protecting free speech and a free press — the 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. At the Newseum in the Aspen Institute 2011 Washington Ideas Forum, Scalia said the landmark ruling meant “you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not. “Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia said. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’” But in Times v. Sullivan, Scalia said the Supreme Court, under Justice Earl Warren, “… simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.’”
JUSTICE SCALIA: THE 45 WORDS — AND ORIGINAL MEANING — OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Republicans should sue the journalism cartel for libel in direct defiance of Sullivan. It should be up to that cartel to prove that it actually is "a reliable source.” But evidence to the contrary abounds, and proving an absence of perspective - “bias” in their work is not a practical undertaking.
And it must not be forgotten that the federal government - the FCC - is involved in the journalism business, and should be told by SCOTUS to butt out. So the FCC should be a defendant in the lawsuit.

It is necessary - and possible IMHO - to sue the MSM into oblivion. And to sue to legally constrain the FCC and the FEC as well.

Sue wire service journalism - wire services and members/subscribers - on grounds that the wire services have created an illegal cartel. Each wire service is a continual virtual meeting of its members/subscribers. And as Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Name the FCC and the FEC also, for putting the imprimatur of the government on the cartel’s functioning.

Sue individual journalists, news organizations, and wire services for enormous damages for libel. Note that:

The self-serving propaganda that “journalists are objective” could not possibly be true, in fact is not true because journalism is consciously about bad news reflecting poorly on society and well on government, and in fact has the effect of politically homogenizing all journalism.

Pace the Warren Court’s unanimous 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, the First Amendment does not modify libel law. At all.
As Antonin Scalia explained, the Bill of Rights was carefully crafted to be a guarantee that no right of any American was, or would in future be, changed by the Constitution. The right to redress if libeled not excluded.
Think: How else satisfy the requirement of the Antifederalists for a list of rights and the Federalists’ concern that listing some rights would denigrate others? The enumerated rights are not created, and not modified, by being enumerated. Instead they are enumerated because tyrants had historically denied them because of their political potency.
Since the Bill of Rights had to be ratified to protect the political viability of the Constitution itself, the proposed BoR was not the place to promote changes in the rights of the people as then understood. Not when you were selling the proposition that the Constitution made no non-explicit changes in those rights. Specifically, the expression “the freedom . . . of the press” referred to freedom of the press as it then existed. Freedom limited by laws including that of libel.

“The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” ― Alexander Hamilton
For “men” read, “the journalism cartel.” The tyrannical impulses in American society are novel in the sense that they come not directly from a tyrant but from the media cartel acting on the people and inducing them to think they want tyranny. Prominent among the cartel's “arts” is the redefinition of terms:

”objective” is a term by which the cartel means only “going along perfectly with the journalism cartel - and therefore getting along perfectly with the journalism cartel.” And the cartel allows it to be used only to describe journalists in good standing with the cartel.

all other adjectives which have positive nominal meanings in a political sense - e.g.,

”liberal”
”progressive”
”moderate”
”centrist”
- also are redefined by the cartel to mean nothing other than “going along perfectly with the journalism cartel - and therefore getting along perfectly with the journalism cartel.” However, the journalism cartel will never permit the use of such terms to a working member of the cartel. That would blow their cover.

”conservative” is the term which is applied to any and all who do not get along with the journalism cartel by going along the journalism cartel. “Conservative” was never a political virtue in America; so-called “conservatives” conserve liberty and in that sense promote change. So-called “conservatives” actually promote progress of, by, and for the people. Prominently including the use of “fossil” fuels or the careful use of nuclear fission energy (whereas, going by their record regarding natural gas, so-called “progressives” would oppose controlled fusion energy if it threatened to subvert their alarmism).
A century ago there was an adjective which described Freepers accurately - but that word, then having a very positive nominal meaning in the political sense, was coopted into meaning essentially its opposite (in the 1920s, according to Safire’s New Political Dictionary). Astonishing but true, that word was “liberal."

An Honest Media Would Force The Democrat Impeachment Circus to Shut Down
. . .The corrupt media of course will do everything they can to make it all seem oh, so damaging to the President, but the reality is that the only truly compelling moments in the entire day were produced by the epic opening statement by Devin Nunes and by the questioning from three GOP members, Jim Jordan, John Ratcliffe and Chris Stewart.

An honest media is an oxymoron.

“The media” is a term which was coined to include not only journalism but fictional entertainment via movies and TV. The fiction “media” were and are indubitably leftist, but - short of banning fiction entertainment - there is no way to control or even readily quantify “bias in the media” which doesn’t pretend to be nonfiction.
For that reason I dislike discussing “the media” and much prefer to discus journalism. And more specifically, wire service journalism. Wire services constitute virtual meetings of the journalism outlets which belong to or subscribe to them. And considering Adam Smith’s dictum that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” you have to stoop to utter naiveté to avoid the assumption that major US journalism engages routinely in "a conspiracy against the public.”
The “conspiracy against the public,” I submit, is centered on the self-serving propaganda campaign to the effect that “journalists are objective.” Good events are, in general, long in planning and execution - and thus do not qualify as “news.” Journalism would make more fuss over a house burning down than a hundred houses being constructed. Journalism is therefore systematically negative towards society and naive towards its corrective institution, government.
This means that the claim that “journalists are objective” is not only fallacious but cynical - the suggestion being that negativity (what actually describes journalism) is “objectivity.” Journalists know that actually trying to be objective is a difficult discipline, and no fun. They also know that if they go along ideologically with other journalists, no journalists will complain that they are not objective - and if they do compete ideologically with other journalists, they may be condemned as “not a journalist, not objective.” The effect is herd behavior by journalists - and redefinition of the term “objective” to mean, “in accord with journalism’s ideological consensus.”
And “objective” is far from the only word which journalists have redefined. Other words which have virtuous implications - “liberal,” “progressive,” “moderate,” and “centrist” have been redefined to mean what journalists have distorted “objective” into meaning. The only difference being in acceptable - to journalists - usage: “objective” is to be applied only to journalists, and never to non-journalists. And no other adjectives are ever to be applied to a journalist.
The redefinition of words is thus another, related, “conspiracy against the public” just as “journalists are objective” propaganda is.
“The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” ― Alexander Hamilton
Who better to transmit "every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse” to the people than a cartel of journalists? Wire service journalism should be sued under antitrust law.
The great problem in dealing with journalism has been the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, which states in part that ". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” Which sounds good, if you do not understand the true meaning and context of the First Amendment. In reality, freedom of the press - freedom within the constraints of libel law - already existed before the enactment of the Constitution. The First Amendment, Antonin Scalia noted, was must-pass legislation without which the ratification of the Constitution itself might readily have been revoked. So the First Amendment was not written to change rights but to prevent changes in any rights. It is for that reason that 1A does not name merely “freedom of the press” but “the freedom of the press” - freedom within traditional constraints. The enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights were only those rights which had been historically subject to tyrannical abuse.
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.” - James Madison, Federalist, no. 45

Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It is thus nonsense to speak of any traditional right not - excluding libel - that it ". . . can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment." The First Amendment was intended to, and written to, preserve rights to recompense for libel. Sullivan is bad law.
The journalism cartel - all the wire services and their members/subscribers - should be sued by Republican politicians nominally prevented from doing so by Sullivan. There is no danger that “liberals” will sue “the media” - they go along, and therefore get along, with journalists perfectly.

Inside The Media Conspiracy

One fact - and one dictum by Adam Smith - are very difficult to refute:

The fact is that any wire service is a virtual meeting of its members or subscribers. Most certainly that is true of the Associated Press and its members.

The Adam Smith dictum is that
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The ineluctable conclusion is that anyone who argues from, or argues for, the assumption that there is no such thing as a “conspiracy” among journalists is either naive himself, or thinks that you are naive.
But cut the journalists a small amount of slack: that conspiracy is the air they breathe, they are like the fish who will be the last one to discover water. Or like I was, once, in a rec league basketball game.
It happened that I had occasion to complain to the ref that “It’s getting a little rough in there.” My opponent groaned - and an instant’s reflection made me entirely sympathetic. In that league I was a power forward, and in that game the team we were playing was without its center/enforcer. So as it worked out, the most the other team could muster under the boards was a smallish forward - up against our center and a distinctly bigger forward. it probably was "getting a little rough in there” - but I was undoubtedly dishing out as good as I got, and more. And not even realizing it.
In the Warren Court’s 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, Justice Brennan asserted that "libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” In that reading, government officials are the danger, and a free press in need of protection. And certainly there was potential truth in that - in that the first eight amendments to the Constitution all enumerate rights which tyrannical governments had historically denied. And yet.
The initial absence of a bill of rights in the Constitution was neither an oversight nor an effort to subvert the rights of the people. In seeking to supplant the weak Articles of Confederation with the Constitution establishing a strong federal government, the Federalists had all the fish they could fry, without risking the reputation of their Constitution by allowing the perception that they were allowing for the weakening of anyone’s rights.
And yet the rights of the people were matters of common law, nowhere comprehensively codified. In that sense the demand of the Antifederalists for a bill of rights was potentially a poison pill - any such enumeration simply had to leave room for complaint of serious omissions. Indeed, the boundaries among the various rights routinely get resolved in court cases to this day, with no end in sight. Enumerating all rights in the Constitution simply was not a legitimate option. Thus, the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The right to compensation for libel is a Ninth Amendment right. But, Justice Brennan would argue, the First Amendment clearly established "freedom of the press.” That would have been correct if the First Amendment spoke of a general, absolute “freedom of the press.” Instead, 1A enshrines “the freedom of the press.” The freedom of the press, that is, which traditionally existed, as traditionally limited. Otherwise, libel would logically have been eliminated not only for political figures but for everyone. The fact that Sullivan preserved the right to freedom from libel for some (most) while denying it to others is a mark of judicial activism - of judges legislating.
For the last half-century, we have lived under the Sullivan dispensation. It is no accident, comrades (the word a trophy of our victory in the Cold War), that Political Correctness has grown apace in that time. Without the discipline imposed by the realistic threat of libel damages, journalists are free to vent what they want people to believe, with less and less relation to that old-fashioned “truth” thing.
The journalism cartel allows no one to be called “objective,” save for its own membership. Indeed, it allows no member of the cartel to be called anything else. The journalism cartel allows no one to be called “liberal” - or “moderate” or “progressive” or “centrist” or any other label connotations political virtue - who does not assiduously go along and get along with the journalism cartel. So “liberals” do not get libeled. As a practical matter Sullivan prevents any court from adjudicating any fact brought before it solely to vindicate a truth inconvenient to the perspective of the journalism cartel. It thereby entitles “liberals” not only to their own opinions but to their own facts.
That is the very definition of political correctness. The entire Warren Court ruled incorrectly in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Journalists - the people generally - have IMHO the right to express their own opinions as opinions. But not the people generally, and certainly not a cartel of journalists, have the right to damage reputations by expressing untruth as fact without diligence commensurate with the venue in which such untruth is expressed.
And journalists are liable to antitrust law just like anyone else.

“Half the truth is often a great lie” - Benjamin Franklin
Since nobody ever tells the whole truth - “Ain’t nobody got time for that” - the attitude and perspective of the writer has to color any report.
The decision to withdraw rather than correct a story when the villain of the piece turns out to be a Democrat instead of a Republican simply reveals that the editor of the publication favors the Democrat Party. There’s no law against that - and there shouldn’t be, and under the First Amendment there can’t be. But.
The actual problem is the existence of the journalism cartel, spontaneously generated by the wire services and empowered by the Warren Court’s unanimous - unanimously wrong - 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision.
Objection to the claim that American journalism is a cartel is fatuous. Evidence which can be criticized as “anecdotal“ abounds, but what cannot be refuted is that the wire services constitute continual virtual meetings of all major US journalism. “Meetings” which began before the Civil War and are ongoing with not end in sight. The logical implication is drawn by Adam Smith: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It is naive to believe that journalists whose entire culture is defined by meeting among themselves about business - and who belong to organizations with names like “Associated” Press or “United” Press International - would not take behavior which is actually “conspiracy against the public” for granted as unexceptionable “business as usual.”
The wire services and their member/subscriber outlets are wide open for antitrust suits or prosecution.
To see the “conspiracy against the public,” it is logical to evaluate the actual business model of journalism. Journalism is actually about bad news. Consequently journalism is systematically negative - which naturally tends to imply that “the government should do something” about one situation or another. Journalism is negative towards society, but claims to be objective. But claiming that “negativity is objectivity” is nothing if not a description of cynicism.
The cartel’s claim of objectivity has the effect of redefining “objectivity” to mean cynicism towards society (and naiveté towards government). The cartel systematically rejects applying the term “objective” to anyone outside the cartel - and systematically labels that member of the cartel “objective.” But the cynical conspiracy doesn’t end there; the cartel also redefines every politically positive adjective - starting with “liberal,” but including “centrist,” “moderate,” and “progressive” - to mean exactly what they make “objective” mean (differing from “objective" only in the usage the cartel will allow).
The cartel eliminates ideological competition among journalists. The Sullivan decision - which eliminates libel suits by Republican government officials (“liberals” obviously don’t get libeled) - entitles “liberals” and “objective journalists” not only to their own opinions but to their own facts. And that is the engine of Political Correctness; Republicans are denied any peaceable venue to establish facts not congenial to “liberals.”
The fallacy of the Sullivan decision is that it justifies itself with the claim that ‘'libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” One is tempted to take that at face value, but Antonin Scalia pointed out that The Bill of Rights was intentionally structured not to compromise the right to sue for libel. The purpose of the entire BoR was to assure everyone that the Constitution did not compromise any right; the great project of the creation of the strong Federal Government depended on the success of that project. The Ninth Amendment practically says exactly that, and the wording “the freedom . . . of the press” in the First Amendment refers to traditional freedom of the press as traditionally limited (by libel and pornography laws, for example).

So will the many mainstream media outlets who were hyping the validity of the Steele dossier now apologize?

Rush likes to poke fun at Bill Clinton’s plaint about the lack of a “truth detecter” to rebut Rush’s telling the truth about him. But in fact the lack of a truth detecter is precisely the problem with the journalism cartel.
But the fact is that there is a mechanism in law for having the courts serve that function - the libel suit. Trouble is, in 1964 the Warren Court disabled libel as a political “truth detecter" with its (unanimous) New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision. And that has allowed “the MSM” to “go ballistic” without feedback from reality. Thus, no apology from those who participated in the attempted coup against us by parroting whatever the deep state wanted it to say. As long as nobody can touch them financially, why would they have to accept reality?
The solution can only be that Republicans sue the MSM - for more money than the MSM can count - in direct defiance of the Sullivan decision. “What!” you will say, “Sullivan merely enforces the First Amendment when it prevents government officials from harassing journalists with frivolous lawsuits!” Or as Justice Brennan put it in Sulivan, ". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.”
But according to Justice Scalia, that is rank poppycock. Why? Because the First Amendment, because the entire Bill of Rights, was intended and understood to be conservative by its framers and ratifiers. The Federalists won their desideratum - a strong federal government uniting the 13 states - only by promising the addition to the Constitution of a bill of rights. The Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” expresses the sentiment of the Federalists that the rights of the people were in the Common Law, and nowhere comprehensively catalogued in a way which could be embedded in the Constitution.
The first eight amendments “enumerate” rights - but they did not create them. Those rights are only those rights which history suggested tyrant might violate for self-aggrandizement. The rights enumerated are neither created nor changed by the Bill of Rights. Assaying to change a right would have invited controversy, and controversy - and suppressing controversy over the then-novel Federal Government was the sole actual intent of the Bill of Rights. And in fact, libel (and pornograpy, and other) restrictions on “the” freedom - freedom as it existed before the Constitution - of the press were never questioned in court on First Amendment grounds until the Warren Court’s Sullivan decision. Which, incidentally, touched only libel suits by some people - a novel limitation on libel suits by public officials. This, I submit, is a mark of judicial legislation.
Thus Justice Scalia - who made his chops with his solo dissent in Morrison v. Olson which, rather than the eight-vote majority opinion, is now considered dispositive - dismissed the conceit that Sullivan is “settled law.” But the other factor not considered in Sullivan is the fact of “the MSM” - or, as I prefer to refer to it, “the journalism cartel.” That there should be such a thing as CNN or The Nation magazine is entirely unexceptionable and protected freedom of the press. But 1964 was the acme of the conceit that three broadcast networks - networks dependent on the sanction of the federal government for its licenses were objective and trustworthy. That was only four years after the Nixon-Kennedy “debates” were telecast, and TV’s political influence was a ticking bomb which exploded over the course of the Johnson and Nixon Administrations.
The journalism cartel, like the mafia, “doesn’t exist.” But two facts, taken together, make doubt of its existence woefully naive:

The wire services in general and the AP “wire” in particular constitute virtual meetings of all major US journalism. The AP was in full flower by the end of the Civil War.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The journalism cartel assumes - as do the FCC and the FEC - that journalists are objective. A great many people, including many FReepers, assume or demand that journalism be objective. In fact, the conceit that journalism is objective has been propagandized by the journalism cartel and by schools so effectively for so long that it is a planted axiom in much political discussion. But altho objectivity may be a laudable goal, it is not a state of being, and certainly is not demanded or assumed by the Bill of Rights. No one can state every known fact - “Ain’t nobody got time for that” - and yet “Half the truth is often a great lie. Consequently the people must judge who to believe, and who to trust to proclaim relevant truth about what.
Except that everyone - not just the Covington kids but politicians and judges as well - is entitled to the reputation his/her actual behavior has merited. Libel law is the legal way to vindicate that right. The alternative - dueling - has been rejected by America for most of two centuries.
Freed from the constraint of libel law, the journalism cartel has systematically libeled conservative politicians and judges. Leaving “liberals” unscathed. Why would that be? The answer I see is that news is not “Everything went as planned,” but “Wow! Nobody expected this disaster!” Journalism is on the lookout for bad news about society. Journalism is negative, and negativity is “objectivity” only to the cynic. But nobody can be cynical about everything. The opposite of cynicism is naiveté and, per Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the opposite of society is government. To claim that journalism is objective, knowing that it actually is negative, is to be cynical. And to be cynical about society is to be naive about government.
The combination of cynicism about society and naiveté towards government has an explicit name - it is socialism. Because of the difficulty of actually being objective, the natural default of journalists is to go along and get along with the other members of the journalism cartel. “Objectivity” becomes, not a word for neutrality, but a synonym for socialist ideology. Likewise the other words for political virtue - “liberal,” “progressive” (there are no Americans who are actually conservative), “moderate,” or “centrist” - are assigned the same meaning which the cartel assigns to “objective.” The only difference being usage, the cartel requires that journalists be called “objective” and that all other socialists be described with those other synonyms for “objective.”
The upshot is that the Sullivan decision compromises the rights only of people who oppose socialism, since socialists are never libeled. Sullivan is the enabling “legislation” of Political Correctness. Sullivan makes the journalism cartel members think that “the press” is their title of nobility or of priesthood. Sullivan and the journalism cartel must be destroyed. Republican politicians must sue for, and SCOTUS must grant, the ability to vindicate the facts - not opinions but facts - in court.

in this case, we have the option of a quick acquittal. Given the Democrat’s skill for oppo research, trashing witnesses, and spinning evidence, we can’t take that chance. A swift acquittal based on articles of impeachment that have no constitutional basis and, even if they did, still lack direct evidence, is a win. Take the win. Take it and run like hell. Let Trump dish out vindication on the campaign trail.

Correct, IMHO.
But - here I am on a hobby horse and can’t get off - according to Justice Scalia the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision is bogus. It must not be treated as settled law.
According to all nine members of the Warren Court in Sullivan (concurring with Justice Brennan), “. . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.”
We all revere the First Amendment, so that statement sounds good, and we nod our heads.
But in terms of original intent that statement is poppycock.
In reality, as we all know, there was no bill of rights in the unamended Constitution because the framers knew that our rights were matters of Common Law, and as such were nowhere comprehensively cataloged and defined. And that any attempt to embed such a catalog would raise two questions for every one question it settled. That situation was unchanged after the ratification of the Constitution, but the Federalists had been obliged to promise to create and ratify a bill of rights by amendment promptly upon ratification of the Constitution.
So the intent of the Bill of Rights put forward by the Federalists, and the understanding of those who ratified it, was that the Bill of Rights was conservative. Its intent was to satisfy skeptics of the new government that it did not change the rights of the people. The Bill of Rights has two parts: Amendments 1 thru 8, which enumerate but do not in all cases attempt to define, those existing rights which historically had been abused by tyrants.
The last two amendments in the Bill of Rights are even more explicitly conservative:

Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
As the example of the 21^st Amendment - which repeals the 18^th Amendment - makes clear, the position of the 9^th and 10^th Amendments after the first thru eighth Amendments assures that the First Amendment, for example, cannot be taken to override the Ninth Amendment.
“‘The' freedom . . . of the press” was intended to mean freedom of the press as traditionally limited by libel (and other) laws. And thus it was understood, from its ratification right up to the (1964) date of Sullivan - and thus it must be understood now.
Sullivan affects “liberals” and “conservatives” alike - but only in the sense that a law against sleeping under bridges affects the rich and the homeless alike. “Conservatives” are routinely libeled by “the MSM.” But because “liberals” don’t get libeled, the impediments to suing for libel in Sullivan are moot for them. Why would “conservatives” be libeled mercilessly, and why would “liberals” be immune to being libeled?
Addressing that question requires an unblinking examination of what “the MSM” actually is. “The MSM” is actually “Major US Journalism,” and major US journalism is actually The Associated Press and its member presses, and all other wire services and their subscribers. Why would that “assortment” of journalists function as a single entity? Simply because the wire services are virtual meetings of all their constituents - and because Adam Smith was correct to write that " People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” People of the trade of journalism have been continually meeting, virtually, since before the Civil War - and the assumption that they do not conspire against the public requires an absurd degree of naiveté. Thus, “the MSM.”
What is the character of journalism? Journalism is the reporting of bad news about society, implying the need for more government. And yet journalism traditionally is regarded, and regards itself, as objective. Trouble is, “the conceit that negativity is objectivity” is a serviceable definition of cynicism. Journalism is cynical about society, and naive about government.
That is, journalism naturally tends towards the socialist outlook. The consequence of people with propaganda power and a socialist outlook calling themselves “objective” is, de facto, to define “objective” as “agreeing with a socialist outlook.” And journalists impose a similar definition on “liberal” - or any other political virtue. In short, people who don’t go along and get along with the socialist outlook of journalists don’t get called “liberal.”
What, then, must be done? First, Republican politicians must sue the MSM for antitrust violations in service of commission of libel against conservatives (potentially using RICO). Second, SCOTUS must overturn Sullivan and allow the suit to go forward.
Finally, the punishment must suit the crime: if the plaintiff and defendant don’t agree on any other remedy, the court must require (and supervise the performance of) the production of corrective “propaganda” sufficient to balance the criminal libel propaganda to which the plaintiff has been subjected. “The press” is neither a title of nobility nor a priesthood. Sullivan encouraged the journalism cartel to presume to have exactly that sort of control over acceptable truth.

The WSJ puts a spin on it by association, IMHO, by implied intent of making a pro Trump network.

That may or may not be the case, but I tend to believe it's mainly to have an outlet for straight up news.

Ah, yes, I remember “straight up news” - and the tooth fairy, as well.
“Straight up news” isn’t - and never was. The First Amendment is not predicated on that assumption, and in fact stands as an impediment to the government assaying to guaranteed it.
Before the middle of the Nineteenth Century, newspapers were openly about the opinions of their printers. Some even had the name of a political party on their masthead. The origin of the “straight up news” conceit is the wire services generally and the Associated Press in particular. In the post-Civil War era, people became suspicious (very rightly) about the propaganda power of the AP. The AP responded to the questioning by asserting that it was a conduit for the newspapers which were its members - and (as was true at the time) everyone knew that newspapers mostly didn’t agree about anything. So, claimed the AP, the AP itself was “objective.”
The fallacy in that argument is that the AP “wire” was and is a continual virtual meeting of all its member newspapers. And, per - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
The business of journalists is to interest the public. The consequence of asserting (with a massive propaganda campaign) that “journalists are objective” is to put the onus on journalists to avoid the appearance of “bias.” Being objective is a laudable goal but not a state of being. Attempting to be objective is hard work, involving self-scrutiny. Functioning as a member of a mutual admiration society, OTOH, is much easier. If all journalists go along, all journalists will get along - and “objectivity” simply becomes redefined as meaning in conformity with the consensus of journalists.
The journalism cartel defines other terms for its own convenience as well. “Liberal,” “moderate,” “centrist,” or “progressive” all mean the self-same thing as “objective” - with the exception that the usage of “objective” is exclusively for journalists, and none of the other “synonyms” is ever applied to a journalist. That is, “objective journalist” is one word.
And, in the journalist’s conceit, “objective journalist” denotes membership in a priesthood - one putatively reified by the First Amendment. Such is implied in the Warren Court’s 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, which asserted that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
But that is clearly incorrect.
Consider: the principal objection to ratification of the Constitution was the absence of a bill of rights within it, and the Federalists had to promise to add such by amendment in order to gain ratification. Thus, the Bill of Rights was a political obligation rather than a venue for adjusting the rights of the people. The first eight amendments enumerate rights which tyrants had historically abused to aggrandize themselves.
But as the Ninth Amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
makes explicit, the “Bill of Rights” does not codify all the rights of the people. Germane to this discussion, the Bill of Rights does not mention the right to compensation for libel. At all. And yet compensation for libel, like prosecutions for pornography, were taken for granted as rights unaffected by the First Amendment until SCOTUS handed down the Sullivan decision.
The Bill of Rights - emphatically including the First Amendment - was fundamentally conservative. The voters who ratified it did so on the understanding and intent that it did not change the right to sue for libel.
Some Republican should sue the AP and its membership - and perhaps all of wire service journalism - for systematic libel, in the teeth of Sullivan

Antonin Scalia pointed out that the (unanimous) Warren Court holding in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
is bogus. Justice Scalia pointed out that there was no bill of rights in the unamended Constitution because the Ninth and Tenth Amendments
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
and
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
were implicit in that document. And also because the rights of the people were nowhere comprehensively enumerated (courts are after all still sorting that out 2&frac2; centuries later) and to assay to do so in a noncontroversial way would have been a fool’s errand. Scalia added that the first eight amendments enumerate only those rights which historically had been abused by tyrants.
Scalia’s point was that freedom of speech and of the press already existed before the ratification of the First Amendment - and so did limitations such as laws against pornography. And, crucially, the wording of the First Amendment was crafted not to modify those limitations. That is what “the freedom of speech, or of the press” meant to the people who ratified the First Amendment. And nobody thought that the First Amendment modified libel law, from the Eighteenth Century all the way to the 1964 diktat of the Warren Court in Sullivan.
Sullivan blatantly violates the Ninth Amendment. Mr. Sullivan himself was not a Republican but a “Democrat.” The scare quotes signify that no present-day Democrat would associate with him, because he was a racist southern Democrat. But that nomenclature confusion aside, the reality is that Sullivan only affects conservatives - “liberals” don’t get libeled, for the simple reason that nobody whom the press is inclined to libel would ever be called “liberal” by the journalism cartel.

I see two possible solutions:

Establish a Senate rule requiring a 55, or even 60, vote supermajority in the Senate to even take under consideration an impeachment from the House which will require a 67 vote majority in the Senate to convict. Anything less is obviously an unserious waste of the time of the Chief Justice and the Senate.

Sue into oblivion the arrogant journalism cartel which is the result of the continuous virtual meetings of journalism conducted by the wire services:

Since " People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith, you have to be naive in the extreme to suppose that such “meetings” could go on for a century and a half without producing "a conspiracy against the public.”

The claim by that cartel that “journalists are objective” incentivizes journalists to go along and get along with each other. Even attempting objectivity requires self-examination and serious reflection, which is neither enjoyable nor, under deadline pressure, even possible. Objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being.

Attempting objectivity is serious business. Going along with each other, and getting along with each other in a mutual admiration society is not.

In its 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, the Warren Court modified (weakened) libel law on the basis that ". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” But the Bill of Rights was composed to be profoundly conservative. Those who ratified them had no intention to change any existing right. The First Amendment protects the freedom of the press - freedom as it already existed, with already existing limitations for libel (and pornography). This was understood by jurisprudence from the founding all the way to 1964.
Overturning Sullivan (a unanimous decision) would be controversial, but it is both legitimate “original intent” jurisprudence and the right thing to do to tame “the media.” Sullivan inhibits libel suits by “public figures” - but since “liberals” go along and therefore get along with “the media,” ”liberals” never get libeled." Establishing a Senate rule to require a supermajority in the Senate to take up an impeachment would be easy, but also easy to override. Both things should be done.

that every time POTUS mentioned CNN, the entire arena BOO’ed vigorously.

The fundamentals of modern journalism are that:
Journalism is about surprise, which is typically the failure of a plan or expectation. Journalism is therefore about bad news.

Journalism is therefore systematically negative - knowingly so.

Major US journalism is wire service journalism - and therefore all major US journalists are in continual virtual meetings about their business - about what the news is. And that has been going on since before the Civil War.
Consequently
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
major us journalism is necessarily a cartel. At the very least, you’d have to “naive as a babe” to believe anything else.

The journalism cartel projects the conceit that names of political virtues (“objective,” “liberal,” “progressive,” etc.) each mean nothing other than agreement with the journalism cartel. “Objective” differs in the cartel’s lexicon in that its usage is always and only to describe journalists, and no other. No other description of a journalist is permitted by the lexicon.

But since journalism knows that journalism is negative, the conceit that “journalists are objective” directly implies that “negativity is objectivity.” And that conceit is patently cynical.

Journalism is cynical about society and naive about government, which are two different things.
Hence, the “MSM” that we know and “love."

Maybe it would be more effective to simply dust off those antitrust books and punish abuse rather than use tax rates to punish success.

I am flatly in favor of that . . as long as you are talking about antitrust violations by the journalism cartel.
The journalism cartel (aka “the media”) is the inevitable result (People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” - Adam Smith) of the continuous virtual meeting of all major journalists which the AP “wire” (and all other wire services) constitute. Which is precisely about business, and which has been ongoing since before the Civil War.
The journalism cartel’s “conspiracy against the public” hides in plain sight. Journalism is good at propaganda, and the natural use of propaganda against the public is to promote your own business. Journalism’s business is attracting an audience with bad news - and the journalism cartel propagandizes the public that journalism’s product - copy which interests the public - is actually “the public interest.” Those are two different things.
The journalism cartel projects the conceit that names of political virtues (“objective,” “liberal,” “progressive,” etc.) each mean nothing other than agreement with the journalism cartel. “Objective” differs in the cartel’s lexicon in that its usage is always and exclusively used to describe journalists, whereas “liberal,” “progressive,” etc. are used exclusively to describe fellow travelers of journalists.
But since journalism knows that journalism is negative, the conceit that “journalists are objective” directly implies that “negativity is objectivity.” - a patently cynical conceit. Journalism is cynical about society and, concomitantly, naive about society’s opposite - government. Thus, a journalism cartel naturally would promote socialism - just as we observe in the case of “the media.”
Opponents of socialism, OTOH, are neither cynical nor naive about either government or society - rather, opponents of socialism are skeptical of both society (so they admit that government is necessary) and government (so they insist that government be limited).
The right to sue for libel existed, along with freedom of the press, before the adoption of the Constitution. And that is the natural remedy for the abuse which proponents of limited government - which opponents of socialism - suffer from “the media.” But in 1964 the Warren Court - then at the zenith of its liberal activism - erected (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan) a barrier to politicians or judges suing for libel. A 9-0 decision, Sullivan have been considered insurmountable for half a century now.
Yet before 1964 no court had ever held that 1A modified libel law at all. Why? Because the intent of the Bill of Rights was not to change any existing right - at all - but to prevent changes in existing rights. Controversy over the effect of the Constitution on peoples’ rights was the only thing threatening the Federalists’ fondest hope, which was for the strong federal government under the Constitution to be noncontroversial. Assaying to change libel law, or any other law establishing any other right, was no way to tamp down controversy. And changing anyone’s rights was therefore the furthest thing from the minds of the proposers and the ratifiers of the First Amendment.
2A’s preservation of the existing RTKBA obviously did not touch your right not to be assaulted with a deadly weapon - and 1A’s preservation of the existing freedom of the press did not touch your right to sue for libel if, analogously, your reputation was assaulted with a (reputationally) deadly press. The Sullivan decision’s claim that ". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment” is therefore flatly wrong. When libel is the issue, 1A has nothing to do with the case.
Sullivan prevents both Democrat and Republican politicians from suing for libel - but “liberals” don’t get libeled. Republicans must sue “the media,” and SCOTUS must issue a restraining order which will make “the media” as loathe to libel Republicans as they already are to libel “liberals."

the only cable news source

I have trouble reminding myself that, for many years, I myself was a “news radio” fan. My daughter was shocked when I mentioned that, because all her sentient life she had seen me treating “news” like it was an advertisement for something I wouldn’t buy on a bet. Which is precisely what it is.
The reason is that “If it bleeds, it leads” commercial journalism is an entertainment format which is dedicated to bad news. This negativity is augmented by the superficiality induced by short deadlines - let alone “breaking news.” Compound that negativity with a claim (direct or indirect) that “journalists are objective,” and you have a perfect socialist storm. Why? Because the idea that “negativity is objectivity” is a cynical conceit.
It would be incoherent to be cynical about one thing, and also cynical about something else which is the opposite of it. Journalism is cynical about society. And, correspondingly, journalism is naive about government, which is the opposite of society. And, pace the blather about “government ownership of the means of production,” IMHO “cynicism towards society and naiveté towards government” is what defines socialism. “Socialism" should more descriptively be called, “governmentism.”
Establishment Journalism is a cartel induced by the traditional dominance of news dissemination by the wire services. The wire services are virtual meetings of their members/subscribers, and those meetings have the effect Adam Smith would have predicted:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
Since as I pointed out, journalism inherently promotes socialism, The “conspiracy against the public” resulting from the wire services is simply an amplification of that effect. The raison d'être of the wire services was the conservation of expensive telegraphy bandwidth in the widespread dissemination of news to the newspapers. But in the Internet era, telegraphy bandwidth is dirt cheap, and the wire services are no longer “too big to fail,” and they should be sued into oblivion under antitrust law.
Such a lawsuit must also attack one of the worst excesses of the Warren Court, the unanimous 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision. Sullivan effectively eliminates the ability of politicians and judges to sue for libel. It does so on the fatuous rationale that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
. . . as if the First Amendment had ever been thought to touch libel law. It hadn’t, for the simple reason that the Bill of Rights was crafted to suppress controversy over the preservation of the rights of the people under the new, tenuously ratified, Constitution. The Federalists had their greatest desire - a strong federal government - subject only to their satisfying the public that the Constitution changed nobody’s rights. The Bill of Rights was therefore profoundly conservative of rights - particular rights, but also Common Law rights. “The” freedom of the press was freedom as it existed in 1788 - freedom subject to libel and, e.g., pornography restrictions.
Whoso claims that politicians don’t have protection from libel because “freedom of the press” might just as well claim that politicians have no protection from having the windows shot out of their houses because “right to keep and bear arms.” It’s nonsense. And the effect of that nonsense is to unleash socialist propaganda against “conservative” (we are classical liberals) politicians and commentators. And - see Kavanaugh, Brett - conservative judges. The journalism cartel defines “objective,” “liberal,” and “progressive” to mean “in accord with the journalism consensus” (with the caveat that “objective” is applied only to journalists, and “liberal” and “progressive” never are). Thus, no “liberal” is ever libeled, so their nominal inability to sue for libel is moot.
“The freedom . . . of the press” protects the expression of political opinions from tyrannical government. The Sullivan decision extends the idea that the press is threatened by the government - and overreaches by establishing the journalism cartel as a quasi-religious priesthood which is able to reward its acolytes and punish its opponents. Ironically the press, directly and by its influence on the government, persecutes advocates of limited government under cover of Sullivan’s perspective that the press is persecuted if conservatives require it to be truthful.

newspapers - this will move things online - the NYTimes, Telegraph and Guardian are managing well. Local newspapers may work if they go all online. But a massive shakeup - Cronos

The wire services - which are a nineteenth century solution to the 19th/20th Century problem of expensive telegraphy bandwidth - inherently produce a (singular, even tho wire services be plural) “objective journalist” cartel. The AP dates back a decade before the Civil War (tho a map of telegraph lines in the country in 1860 showed a “spider web” of interconnections, whereas the South allowed only one single line). The Sherman AntiTrust Act dates back only to 1890.
Prior to 1890, at least, the AP was aggressively monopolistic in suppressing any other wire service. Any telegraph line startup would be offered enough money to cover its operating expenses by the AP - with the proviso that no other news traffic would be carried on that line. In 1945
The Supreme Court held that Associated Press had violated the Sherman Act. The bylaws of AP at that time, as written, constituted restraint of trade. The fact that AP had not achieved a complete monopoly was irrelevant. The First Amendment did not excuse newspapers from violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. News, traded between states, counts as interstate commerce, and thus makes the issue relevant for the Sherman Antitrust Act. Finally, Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests (326 U.S. 20). - Wikipedia
That didn’t address the fact that each wire service is a virtual meeting of its member journalists - and collectively the wire services constitute virtual meetings of all the major journalists. Meetings which have been ongoing since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. Adam Smith’s dictum that
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Wealth of Nations
implies that you have to be "naive as a babe to believe” that journalists do not “conspire against the public.”
In fact, the conspiracy is in plain sight - it is the propaganda campaign to the effect that journalism - journalism within the good graces of the cartel - is crucially important and “objective.” In fact of course, objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being. Any serious attempt at objectivity must begin with the humility to accept that objectivity doesn’t come naturally to anyone, journalist or not. The effect of the assumption of the objectivity of everyone else in your profession can only result in groupthink. Anyone who does not go along with the journalistic consensus on any given topic does not get along with it. And promptly has his career “pecked to death” by unanimous proclamation that the miscreant is “not a journalist, not objective.”
The entertainment imperative means that journalism is about difficult-to-ignore bad news and, consequently, journalism is negative. Negative about society, and implicitly naive about what society’s opposite - government - can do/be. The conceit that journalism is objective - when instead it is knowingly negative - is the very definition of cynicism. Which explains why “objective" journalism naturally produces pro-socialist - that is to say, anti limited constitutional government - propaganda.
My bottom line is that the wire services are not “too big to fail” as they were in ’45, and they have no legitmate and significant raison d'être which any court is bound to respect. They must be sued into oblivion. Whether by an individual or by the DoJ.

We will never have an honest national discussion about Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party and the pandemic they inflicted on us if our media megacorporations have anything to say about it. And they do.

And they will continue to, precisely as long as the unanimous 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision is a respected legal precedent. Some Republican - Trump, IMHO - must sue “the media” for libel, in the teeth of Sullivan. And SCOTUS must - and seriously might - overturn that (evil and incorrect) unanimous Warren Court decision.
Sullivan is wrong because it depends on the claim
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
that the First Amendment affects libel law. That proposition was novel in law in 1964, for the simple reason that the First Amendment - that the entire Bill of Rights - was crafted and ratified by people who had no intention to change any legal right. At all.
The entire objective of the drafters of the Bill of Rights was not to modify or improve then-existing rights, but strictly to suppress controversy over the effect of the Constitution on then-existing rights. Having failed to satisfy the country that the retention of all rights was implicit in the Constitution, the Federalists achieved their fondest desire - a strong national government - only by promising a bill of rights by amendment. The great problem was that the rights of the people were, in British tradition, matters of common law - and therefore were nowhere comprehensively cataloged. Rather than assaying to create such a novel catalog - as a way of suppressing controversy over rights that would have been a fool’s errand - the Federalists enumerated only those rights which had historically been abused by tyrants. And followed that list with the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The right to sue for libel, was well established, and no amendment explicitly compromises that right. Consequently the intent of the ratifiers of the Constitution was understood, all the way up to 1964, that that right was unchanged. Thus, Sullivan is bad law.
Worse, Sullivan is evil. Absent the discipline of the threat of libel, freedom of the press becomes license to propagandize. That would be problematic enough if journalism were an ideologically competitive institution. But because all major journalism continually “meets,” virtually, under the aegis of the wire services, and because
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
journalism is ideologically homogenized. The unity of journalists and socialists around their mutual enthusiasm for crisis promotes ever-increasing government. And since
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . .. . — Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776)
it follows that Sullivan is evil.

If we are to ultimately survive as a society in its current form, America must find an effective way to hold these corrupt media organizations accountable

The 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision basically repeals restrictions against libeling conservatives. It doesn’t sound like that, in fact it sounds good:
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
Everyone loves himself some First Amendment. So what could be wrong? Let me count the ways:

The conceit that 1A touched libel law at all was novel in American jurisprudence in 1964. The reason should be clear to any conservative who hears the history which they already know about the Bill of Rights.
The Federalists had one overarching objective - to dispel controversy over the ratification of the Constitution. They initially sought to avoid controversy over the effect of the Constitution on rights by simply omitting reference to them in the Constitution - and arguing that the Constitution didn’t change them at all. The Antifederalists succeeded in extracting the promise of a bill of rights by amendment from the Federalists.
With the necessity of adding a bill of rights foisted on them, the Federalists then did two things:

In the first eight amendments, they enumerated only those rights which tyrants had historically abused. Including the freedom of the press, but not explicitly the right to sue for libel damages.

In the Ninth Amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
the Federalists took cognizance of the fact that rights were matters of Common Law, nowhere comprehensively codified. There is nothing in 1A explicitly modifying the right to sue for libel, and nothing excepting that right from protection under 9A. The right to sue for libel therefore was, and therefore is, unchanged. Justice Brennan and the entire Warren Court to the contrary notwithstanding.

Journalism is the discipline of attracting attention by publishing news which is difficult to ignore. That is, frightening news. Journalism is about bad news, and journalists know it.
Knowing that journalism is negative, journalists claim (or powerfuly imply) that journalism is objective. But "the conceit that 'negativity is objectivity’” is difficult to improve on as a definition of cynicism. Journalists are cynics - cynical about society. And since as Common Sense points out, society and government are in a real sense opposites, cynicism towards society maps directly to naiveté about government. Journalism is thus institutionally disposed towards socialism.

Everything you can say bad about journalism is magnified by the fact that the wire services have inevitably created a journalism cartel. The wire services create continual virtual meetings among all major journalists and Adam Smith’s dictum that " People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” is amply borne out in the herd-like behavior of journalists.
It is wire service journalism which mercilessly libels conservatives, and assure that “the buck stops ~~here~~^^_nowhere_.

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