Word: libellant
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...informed people can govern themselves. To further that goal, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom was written on behalf of a press that was far more noisy, brawling and partisan than the much maligned journalism of today. As a California judge noted in his opinion in a 1979 libel case, George Washington was called a murderer, Thomas Jefferson a blackguard and a knave, Henry Clay a pimp, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant drunkards. Abraham Lincoln was termed a half-witted usurper, a baboon, a gorilla and a ghoul. Yet none of the nation's early leaders even attempted...
While such cases determined that the Government could not sue for libel, the question remained whether public officials who claimed injury as individuals were entitled to seek redress. That issue was at the heart of the defining case for modern American libel law, New York Times vs. Sullivan. The dispute involved a political advertisement, critical of Alabama law enforcement and containing inconsequential errors of fact, that appeared in the Times during the black struggle for civil rights. Several officials, who were mentioned in the ad by function although not by name, sued, ostensibly to recoup their reputations. In fact...
Three of the nine Justices wanted to ban outright all libel suits by public officials against critics of their performance. The full court went almost as far: it held that journalists should not be liable for the results of honest error about public matters, regardless of how false or injurious the report. Said Justice William Brennan in the majority opinion: "Raising as it does the possibility that a good-faith critic of government will be penalized for his criticism, the proposition relied on by the Alabama courts (that an attack on government performance is a personal attack on government officials...
Then, in the wake of Watergate, at about the time the press was riding highest, the pendulum started to swing back. Courts began to narrow the definition of public figures. Chief Justice Warren Burger told trial judges, in a footnote to a 1979 opinion, that too many libel cases were being summarily dismissed--that is, rejected before going to trial. For journalists, the most nettlesome result of the court's shift in mood came in a ruling during the pretrial discovery phase of a suit brought by retired Army Lieut. Colonel Anthony Herbert, a former field officer in Viet...
This ruling, which was soon extended to other libel cases, left journalists nearly as vulnerable for what they did not say as for what they did. It opened to question their judgments and private opinions as much as their public assertions of fact. It also created a bizarre situation in which the more careful a journalist is, the more vulnerable he becomes to charges of malice: a reporter whose extensive research leads him to conclude that one side is right in a dispute can be accused of malice for discounting the evidence on the other side, while a writer...