Word: libellant
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...have a view that at least as to high officials, policy-making officials like Ariel Sharon or William Westmoreland or Paul Laxalt or the judges of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court or any of these other people who are suing... that as to them there should be no libel actions whatever, that they are in the field of politics, and when they go into that field, they accept the risk, they undertake the risk, and answer back...
...address these and other questions. The Crimson last week assembled a panel of three campus figures who have encountered, on a practical or academic level, issues of libel. Anthony Lewis '48, a columnist for The New York Times, is a lecturer at the Law School and has written extensively on First Amendment subjects. Howard Simons, who stepped down this year as the managing editor of The Washington Post, is now curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for journalism. Charles R. Nesson '60, professor of Law, has moderated a number of television programs examining the media...
Crimson: What's the reason for [the upsurge in libel suits being brought by high government officials...
Lewis: ...I don't know the roots of the reasons, but it is clear to me that people are trying to use libel suits as a political weapon. In other words, they are trying again to do again what Commissioner Sullivan and his colleagues in Alabama invented in 1962 when they used the libel suit. I think for the first time in American history, in such a crude way as a device to bar the press from a controversial area of reporting. That attempt was thwarted by the Supreme Court in 1964 in New York Times against Sullivan...
...public doesn't like the press, that the press is arrogant. The press is under great pressure from its critics, and that's the time to go after it. And the second thing is that the jury trials in the last five years, last 10 years, in which a libel suit has gone to trial has gone predominantly against the press...