Their lies are totally over the top.
I do not think that the First Amendment should protect news organizations who just lie to the public. It’s not right.
I have long believed that as well. I can't believe that the Founding Fathers intended for First Amendment protections to be extended to media outlets who are, in actuality, house organs for a particular political party.
There’s a huge difference between freedom of the press and outright slander/libel. These punks need to be sued. As a Trump supporter I wonder if a class action could be formed.
NBC has an FCC license. Knock them off the air.
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.”Scalia pointed out what History class should have told us all - that the Federalists were forced by the Antifederalists to promise that a bill of rights would be added to the Constitution by amendment. And that the reason no bill of rights exists in the unamended Constitution is the Federalists’ conviction that the Ninth and Tenth AmendmentsThat 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
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.andThe 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 the unamended Constitution. The only reason for the First thru Eighth Amendments was to mollify the Antifederalists by enumerating the rights which had historically been abused by tyrants.The right to sue for compensation for libel is not enumerated because Eighteenth Century Americans had no experience of tyranny by a journalism cartel. But the right to sue for compensation for libel is fully within the scope of the Ninth Amendment, and absolutely was considered so in every court, from the time of the passage of the Bill of Rights until the Sullivan decision was handed down in 1964.
In asserting that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”Justice William Brennan and the entire Warren Court erred in Sullivan. The Sullivan decision comes from the position that “the press” is weak and beleaguered. The reality is that, because it functionally is a cartel, “the press” is the core of the Establishment. As such, “the press” has exploited Sullivan to prevent the truth from prevailing over lies.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 the wire services are continual virtual meetings of all major journalism (which have been in continuous operation since before the Civil War), you have to be “naive as a babe to believe” (Oscar Hammerstein) that journalism is not a cartel.
“I do not think that the First Amendment should protect news organizations who just lie to the public.”
I do.
Government should never, ever judge the worth of protected speech.
However, once government is out of the way we can hang the lot of them.
I seem to recall a publisher that got his printing press ruined when he managed to piss off some Mormons.