I was planning on throwing a big party for the death of the SF Chronicle. That was 15-20 years ago. They’re still around so I’m not counting on the big fish going down.
There is a ticking time bomb the Times - along with the rest - should be scared to death of:JUSTICE SCALIA: THE 45 WORDS — AND ORIGINAL MEANING — OF THE FIRST AMENDMENTThat article states in part: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.”The Sullivan decision claimed thatThat 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.’”
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”but, as Scalia noted elsewhere, the whole point of adding the first ten amendments to the Constitution was to reassure the public that the Constitution did not subvert any of their rights. It was no part of the agenda of the ratifiers to change a thing in that regard, because that would have invited controversy - the very opposite of the framers’ objective. Scandalous as it sounds, IOW, the First Amendment thru the Eighth Amendment are overrated. Overrated, in the sense that they never assayed to or pretended to create rights, only to state those rights within the Constitution.The Ninth Amendment says that the enumerated rights are not the only rights which are to be respected. Meaning, that the first eight amendments went without saying and the Federalists thought they were unexceptionable but unnecessary. The First eight amendments “enumerate” only those rights which had historically been abused by tyrants. They could almost be described as being there for show - because their precise meaning was and is a matter of common law.
The bottom line is that, unanimous or no, Sullivan is bad law - and now that the Warren Court is ancient history, the Sullivan decision should be history, too. George Washington had the right to sue for libel. Donald Trump, rightfully, does too. And does he ever have a case!!!