(Dobbs) Those Who Would Compromise Freedom of the Press
Maybe if they lived in nations without it, they'd feel differently.
Some ordinary Americans would be hard-pressed to actually define “freedom of the press.” As it turns out, so would some lawmakers, some jurists, even some journalists themselves.
So I’ll give it a shot: freedom of the press means that journalists can circulate facts and opinions without the intimidating fear of constraint or censorship by their government. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Even when it’s abused— and sometimes it is— freedom of the press is a principal pillar of democracy. Without freedom of the press, governments can operate without watchdogs checking their power. Without freedom of the press, citizens can’t assemble the information they need to make educated decisions about public policy.
Most of the world doesn’t have it. The think tank Freedom House, which campaigns to make governments accountable to their people, cited egregiously bad examples like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Syria and concluded in a report a few years ago titled “Press Freedom’s Dark Horizon” that only 13% of the world’s population lives with a free press. In all likelihood, that figure now has dropped even lower. Think Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Turkey’s Erdogan. Erdogan visited his nation’s earthquake zone on Wednesday and said in response to criticisms of the government’s response to the calamity, “I cannot stomach people conducting negative campaigns for political interest.”
Shades of Donald Trump’s mantra, now a motto of MAGA: “fake news.” It was Trump who borrowed menacing language from two of modern history’s most malicious despots— Mao Tse Tung and Joseph Stalin— and declared that the news media were “the enemy of the people.”
Now, his autocratic copycats don’t want to stop with the rhetoric. They want to stop the media’s freedom, or at the very least, to stifle it.
This time it’s Florida’s governor and presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis. This doesn’t come as a surprise. Three years ago during the early stages of the pandemic, when he “reopened” Florida almost before any other state and his strategy was slammed in The Miami Herald, his response was to ban the Herald’s reporter from a news conference. Last year, when a journalist raised criticisms about how DeSantis handled the deadly and destructive Hurricane Ian, the governor’s response was “Stop, stop, stop,” scolding the reporter for “trying to cast aspersions.”
So now he’s on a new tear.
Last week, complete with a stage designed to evoke a television news set, DeSantis hosted a roundtable discussion about what his office labeled as “Legacy Media Defamation Practices.” To be clear, “defamation” means a statement that hurts someone’s reputation. When it’s oral, it’s called slander. In written form, it’s called libel.
What DeSantis told his audience was, “We’ve seen over the last generation legacy media outlets increasingly divorce themselves from the truth and instead try to elevate preferred narratives and partisan activism over reporting the facts.”
At best he got it half right. What he has seen is media outlets divorcing themselves from his truth. During the pandemic, his truth was that Florida could safely afford to reopen. After Hurricane Ian, his truth was that the state did a bang-up job with rescue and relief. One can argue the merits of his positions but the point is, plenty of citizens argued that his truth was wrong. So, were reporters who quoted his critics, or commentators who conveyed their contrary opinions, defaming him? Or were they communicating legitimate points of view, whether faultless or not?
Here’s where freedom of the press gets tricky. In a unanimous decision almost 60 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called “New York Times v. Sullivan” that the First Amendment to the Constitution limits the power of public officials to sue for defamation. The reasoning given was "to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people."
The result of the Court’s decision was this: if public figures like Ron DeSantis want to sue for slander or libel, they must prove not only that what was said about them was wrong and caused them harm, but also that there was “malicious intent” behind it, either because the reporter or commentator knew the information was false, or else recklessly disregarded the truth.
Those are high standards of proof but there’s a powerful purpose behind them: without those protections for journalists— in other words, if the penalty for unintentionally getting it wrong could be a stiff financial hit or even a stint behind bars— they will be less likely to offer criticism of public figures, whether it’s someone else’s assessment or their own, and they will surely be less likely to zealously investigate them. That’s a classic definition of a chilling effect. But from accounts of the one-sided roundtable about “Legacy Media Defamation Practices,” Governor DeSantis and his cohorts would carve away at those protections, urging the Supreme Court to revisit and at least partially revoke the free press precedent it set 60 years ago in “New York Times v. Sullivan.”
What I’ve always said about my own reporting is, I’ve never written or uttered a word that I didn’t either know to be true, or had good reason— based on sources or secondhand accounts— to believe to be true. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t sometimes still inadvertently get something wrong. Inevitably, every journalist does. It’s too simple to say you’ve got to take the bad with the good. But if that “unfettered interchange of ideas” is compromised, it could put us on a path to self-censorship and self-constraint.
Then, freedom of the press itself is compromised and the party that’s hurt is the American public.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg, thanks for writing this. Important to remind us. The right in the US enjoys being cosseted from real news, but with all the challenges to local papers and reliable news reporting, rolling back Sullivan would be awful. De Santis knows Thomas at least 3-5 other Scotus right wingers would be happy to oblige. Easier to destroy freedom in darkness.