Thanks for your reasoned response which is also my understanding of the way slander and libel laws are being intrepreted.
Accordingly, “under the definitions of New York Times v Sullivan and subsequent libel case law,” no slander or libel laws can be applied against anyone who speaks lies against any “public figure”, whoever that may be.
Please don’t miss my point that I am referring to out-and-out lies and not just a criticism or joke about a public person; lies that are provably wrong and are harmful, especially to a public person The way things are, I believe, is not the way the First Amendment was intended to be upheld.
Also, you mention the flip side of the coin: What about the left suing the right for libel. Well, I always tell the provable truth about anyone and everyone and expect to have legal recourse when I (my name) am libeled or slandered. I post on FR; what keeps me from being called a “public person”? A case could be made for it. Thus, there’s no real legal protection for most Americans against libel or slander, unless it involves a corporation with a buzillion dollars and retained lawyers to push it.
Liberals already sue anyone anytime they like. This must be evened out somehow.
Under current conditions, to win a libel lawsuit is very difficult but not impossible. Most of the time people who win a lawsuit are either major cases involving multimillion dollar lawsuits or private figures about whom a newspaper recklessly screwed up a story. For example, one of my former newspapers almost printed the wrong mug shot by switching a minor criminal's photo with an accused murderer of very similar names, and if that hadn't been caught at the last minute we all would have been in REALLY deep kimchi.
My job got saved because I kept a page proof that ordinarily would have been thrown away which proved that the page, as I had approved it, did **NOT** have the wrong photo and the photo got switched later in the process. I learned (to the undying frustration of my family and subsequent editors since then) never, ever, ever, to throw **ANYTHING** away that might have the remotest possibility of being needed later.
That's a concrete example of what it means to avoid “reckless disregard for the truth.” Newspapers, when they screw up (and they all do, since there's no way to print tens of thousands of words every day without mistakes) need to be able to prove that they had a process in place to prevent the screwup.
Documenting lack of actual malice is more complicated and it doesn't apply to the sort of case we're discussing. It's more of a situation excusing unintentional screwups for which a newspaper can't be shown to have intended any deliberate harm and in fact printed a quick correction or retraction or clarification to fix the problem.