We Must Defend “The New York Times v. Sullivan”
Trump and his minions are poised to destroy the rule of Law, laid down in The New York Times v Sullivan, which is a pre-requisite for a free and vibrant press.
By
David Gottfried
In 1970, while watching the evening news, I suffered the company of a well-meaning but rather dull woman who said that not much news was being reported, and she inferred that it was a slow news night because “not much was going on” in the world.
We were watching the ABC evening news, which was the first news outlet to douse the kinetic politics of the sixties with the soporific of the seventies: news programs in which the employees on the newscast – the announcers, the man who did the weather, the woman who reported on fashion -- all seemed to get along and were friends. The Nixon administration was very happy about this as it would be so much more politically convenient if viewers would concentrate on the possibility of romance between the lady who talked about fashion and the guy who related news about inflation instead of the news, which included such things as our use of anti-personnel weapons in Vietnam (Our anti-personnel weapons were later copied by Palestinian terrorists)1
On that slow news night in 1970, the newscasters covered a puppy beauty contest and other fare suitable for a ward, in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” inhabited by lobotomized patients who uttered about 3 words a month.
At that time, when we had a slow news night it generally came about because there were not too many stories which could get good ratings. After all, the Network news is first and foremost interested in making money and so they only want news with good film footage and perhaps a touch of the scandalous and salacious as little old ladies in Peoria know that the sex life of Elizabeth Taylor is the most important news of the day.
However, in a little while the news programs will seem truncated and bare because newscasters and journalists will simply be too damn scared to report the news. I am referring to the despicable settlement of Trump’s current suit against ABC. This settlement augurs days in which media will be utterly enfeebled, cowering and trembling before a President who will bankrupt them if they report the truth.
ABC’s agreement to pay Trump 16 million dollars is shameful as ABC is apologizing for believing in the First Amendment
Yesterday, ABC news agreed to pay Donald Trump 15 million dollars in damages and an additional 1 million dollars in legal fees to settle a suit Donald Trump had brought against ABC.
Trump had alleged that ABC had uttered a falsehood, more specifically that George Stephanopoulos had referred to the Carroll Lawsuit in New York (The suit in which Trump was convicted of molesting Caroll in a department store) as one in which Trump had been guilty of rape when in fact he was not formally found guilty of rape.
However, the Judge in that suit said Trump was not found guilty of rape only because New York Law had an especially narrow definition of rape which deviated from the laymen’s definition of rape and that Trump had been guilty of rape insofar as lay people define rape. Therefore, Stephanopoulos did not misrepresent the facts.
More importantly, Trump’s case against ABC was meritless because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in The New York Times v. Sullivan, one of the most important first amendment cases since our nation’s founding.
In the Sullivan case, the Supreme Court said our democracy requires free public debates, unrestricted and robust. Toward that end, we cannot muzzle debates by making newspapers and journalists afraid of suits for defamation. Accordingly, the Court held that if a public figure wanted to sue a journalist for defamation that public figure must allege and prove “actual malice,” which means that the journalist must have known that he was lying or uttered the lie in “reckless disregard of the truth.”
Public figures often make divisive and inflammatory comments designed to arouse discord. Toward that end, public figures will say that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats and that your sons, who went to school at 9 AM wearing shorts, will come home at 3PM wearing panties because they will be given a sex change operation under the auspices of the devious deep state and its platoons of social justice warriors. When public figures spew lies like this, journalists have a duty to call them on their duplicity, and if journalists make an honest mistake, they should not have to offer up a pound of flesh to appease the ravenous appetites of Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, ABC has agreed to pay money to Trump even though Trump's suit was exceedingly weak and was clearly not viable per the New York Times v Sullivan.
The Ominous Consequence of Trump’s Settlement of his suit against ABC in Conjunction with the Supreme Court’s decision, on July 1, 2024, that Presidents are immune from liability for criminal acts
American Jurisprudence degenerated into Fascism on July 1, 2024:
“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first paragraph of her dissent in Trump v. The United States, July 1, 2024.
In the Dred Scott decision, the United States Supreme Court spat on the personhood of black people, holding that black people could not be citizens of this country because they had been brought here to be slaves. In Trump v. the United States, the United States Supreme Court spat on the personhood and autonomy of all Americans as it ruled that the United States President was a virtual demi-God over us, and the exaltation of his status inexorably resulted in the denigration of our status.
Now, the law is going yet another step further.
It is cruel and unjust if we cannot sue our President for his crimes, but at least if we know of his crimes our pride is still intact as we will know that the sin and stain of our country resides in Donald Trump and not in the ideals of the enlightenment and the American Revolution. However, with the Court’s new willingness to penalize speech that is impertinent or not sufficiently docile to Presidential power, we won’t even know the truth as the news may become more and more vacant and may resemble what senile patients perceive as they suffer their dying days in this world.
Of course, I am complaining of the settlement of Trump v. ABC, not a court’s disposition. However, settlements reflect not only what the court has done in prior cases but also what the litigants think the Court may do in their particular case. And although Sullivan v. New York Times mandates that ABC News should get off Scott free, I suspect that ABC agreed to give 16 million dollars to Trump because it expected the Court to eviscerate Sullivan v. New York Times when ABC’s case against Trump was heard in Court.
Major Personages of American Politics are Bowing Down to Trump like Lemmings going over a cliff into the Sea.
Everything around us suggests that more and more institutions and persons in Washington and New York are bowing down to Trump. The Washington Post decided not to make an endorsement in the past election (It usually endorses Democrats) because Bezos felt the need to kneel before Trump. The New York Times reports that many Silicon Valley tycoons who had formerly despised Trump are now kissing his fat ass. Almost every Republican Senator in Washington has become Trump’s pathetic poodle ready to approve RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human services even though he is so inept at taking care of his own health that he has a dead worm in his brain, Tulsi Gabbard as Intelligence Tsar even though she has dismissed our intelligence findings in the past because they deviated from the findings of Putin’s perverted intelligence, and Hegseth as Secretary of defense even though he is so reckless and dissolute that he has fallen down drunk in nightclubs and bars and had to be carried out. Do you really trust him to keep his mouth shut when he meets with big shots in the Russian defense establishment and they offer him some vodka. I have often said that the Trump crew has a fascist streak. But in some ways they are not at all like the fascists of the 30’s and 40’s. In many ways they are bumbling fools and behave like early middle-aged madmen living in their parents’ basements.
However, the wretched men of the Supreme Court don’t act like mad men in their parents’ basements. They behave like embittered, snarling, sneering men who want to push America down the stairway of time and send us hurtling back, back, back to the robber baron days, to the days when poor people went to jail when they couldn’t pay their civil debts, when corporations sold drugs containing opium to make babies fall asleep (And tens of thousands of American children became narcotic addicts), when their was no social security and people worked for 8 cents an hour, and when rich white protestant princes posed for portraits exuding all the arrogance and august anger of Queen Elizabeth the First and Tzar Ivan the Terrible.
For those wretched men have ruled that his haute holiness Mr. Trump cannot be sued for being a murderer and already two members of the Supreme Court, Mr. Clarence Thomas and Mr. Neil Gorsuch, have called for the evisceration of New York Times v. Sullivan, and Judge Lawrence Silberman of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a sharply worded opinion, excoriated The New York Times v. Sullivan.
Before the New York Times v. Sullivan, media outlets were often hobbled and chained by ruinous libel laws and punishing verdicts which put journalists in the poor house. If we lose the New York Times v. Sullivan, we won’t even know what’s going on because the Press will be afraid to tell the truth.
We are rapidly self-destructing into abject Fascism.
Anti-personnel weapons are made to kill people, not military hardware. They are canisters which, upon falling to the ground, break open and dispense hundreds or even thousands of knife-like darts or lances that fly out of the canister and land in human flesh. We used lances which sometimes were constructed so they couldn’t show up on x rays; the Palestinians, lacking our advanced technology, often filled the canisters with hundreds or thousands of nails.
Trump and Hitler: Frail Leaders, Big Lies, and the Press Under Siege
Donald Trump’s latest tantrum against the press—threatening lawsuits and jail for journalists—is a sad echo of Adolf Hitler's more violent war on media freedom. Trump, like Hitler, cannot abide criticism. Both men, frail and insecure, have decided that the best way to protect their fragile egos is by attacking the very foundation of democracy: a free press.
Trump has launched a series of defamation lawsuits against media outlets he dislikes, including one against ABC over a factual error and another against the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll he didn’t like. It's a classic move for a man who can’t handle the truth: if the press doesn't bow to you, sue them into submission. But Trump's strategy isn't just about seeking justice—it’s about using the legal system to drown out dissent. And with his pick for FBI director promising retribution against journalists, the chilling effect is already here.
Hitler, meanwhile, didn’t bother with lawsuits. He simply seized control. The Reich Press Law of 1933 turned independent journalism into state-approved propaganda, and anyone who resisted was either silenced or executed. No lawsuits needed—just the brute force of a regime that crushed free speech under the weight of its own delusions of grandeur. The Nazis even had their own term for “fake news”: Lügenpresse (lying press), a phrase weaponized to delegitimize dissent and discredit the media entirely.
Both leaders, in their own ways, use the media as a scapegoat for their insecurities. Trump calls the press “fake news” whenever it dares to report facts he dislikes, just as Hitler's Reich Ministry of Propaganda spun every inconvenient truth into a lie. Neither man can stomach the idea that their weak, insecure leadership might actually be questioned.
Tyranny doesn’t spring up overnight; it’s built piece by piece, first with threats and then with silence. Trump and Hitler are cut from the same cloth: insecure, petty men who would rather rule with fear than face the truth. Their war on the press is the first step in eroding democracy itself—and it must be resisted at all costs.
For a deeper look into how Trump’s tactics echo those of pre-WWII Hitler, read my full article here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-153103008.
It explores their shared strategies of exploiting grievances, manipulating followers, and undermining democracy.
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