Don’t Let Press Freedom Die in the ‘Sunshine State,’ or Anywhere Else
DeSantis’ mission echoes Trump’s early days in his 2016 campaign when he vowed to fight news outlets that dared to publish harmful coverage about him. “We’re going to open up those libel laws,” he told supporters. “So when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
You’ll have to catch us first, I said to myself. If the media content in question is wrong, the media deserve to be called out on it.
But DeSantis and Trump are both wrong to imply that “disinformation” only applies to ideas they don’t like and that it only comes from the left.
For example, the hottest newsmaking defamation lawsuit these days doesn’t center on The New York Times, CNN or other perennial targets of the right. Rather, it involves Fox News and the disclosures pouring out of lawsuits by voting machine companies for its misleading coverage of the 2020 election, including claims that the vote counting might have been rigged.
Worse, evidence shows that some of the channel’s key figures apparently sought to prevent Fox reporters from fact-checking those assertions.
And Fox is not alone among conservative outlets already under a spotlight for truthfulness. Lowering the threshold for defamation lawsuits could be more dangerous for the conservative media ecosystem, with its many social media and web pages, than it would be for anyone else.
“Disciplined conservatives thinking about 2024 should understand that expanding defamation liability would silence voices across the political spectrum,” Seth Stern, advocacy director for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, recently posted on the group’s website. “It would cause most harm not to mainstream media outlets that can afford lawyers but to independent news outlets and opinionated individuals, including conservatives, who cannot.”
He’s right. This country’s constitutional speech and press freedoms are a model for the rest of the world. That model can be tarnished by government overreach that actually silences the free exchange of ideas, even as it claims to protect them.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
©2023 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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