{"id":706,"date":"2022-07-04T15:11:30","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T15:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/?p=706"},"modified":"2022-07-04T15:11:32","modified_gmt":"2022-07-04T15:11:32","slug":"thomas-fires-warning-shot-at-media-organizations-that-lie-about-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/2022\/07\/04\/thomas-fires-warning-shot-at-media-organizations-that-lie-about-conservatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas fires warning shot at media, organizations that lie about conservatives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

President Joe Biden and his liberal compatriots in politics, the media, and social media constantly are crowing about \u201cmisinformation.\u201d Although the type of censorship they seem to support is not the answer, reconsideration of the legal standard governing defamation, as Justice Clarence Thomas has urged, might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Supreme Court denied certiorari Monday in the case of Coral Ridge Ministries Media v. Southern Poverty Law Center<\/a>. In his dissent from the high court\u2019s refusal to accept the appeal, Thomas once again urges fellow justices to reconsider the double standard for defamation that the court established in New York Times v. Sullivan<\/a> in 1964. Thomas first did so in a longer dissent in 2021 in another case the court refused to hear, Berisha v. Lawson<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TRENDING:<\/strong> IRS packing serious ammunition, now Republicans look to ban it<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coral Ridge Ministries, as Thomas explains, is a \u201cChristian nonprofit dedicated to spreading the \u2018Gospel of Jesus Christ\u2019 and \u2018a biblically informed view of the world.\u2019\u201d  In 2017, Amazon told Coral Ridge Ministries that it was ineligible for Amazon\u2019s nonprofit donation program because it had been labeled as a \u201chate group\u201d by the Southern Poverty Law Center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ministry sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for defaming the organization, saying that although Coral Ridge \u201copposed homosexual conduct\u201d due to its Christian beliefs, it is not a \u201chate group.\u201d The ministry said it \u201chas nothing but love for people who engage in homosexual conduct\u201d and \u201chas never attacked or maligned anyone on the basis of engaging in homosexual conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The defamation case was dismissed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals because Coral Ridge Ministries is considered a \u201cpublic figure\u201d and could not prove that the Southern Poverty Law Center had acted with \u201cactual malice\u201d under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard when it made the \u201chate crime\u201d claim about the ministry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (Official portrait)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cactual malice\u201d standard is the issue that Thomas<\/a> is complaining about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court suddenly created a new legal standard that never existed before in defamation law, which had been governed by state law since our founding, claiming this new standard was required by the Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does this sound familiar?\u00a0According to the court, two legal standards govern defamation lawsuits: one for those considered \u201cprivate\u201d figures or individuals and another, stricter standard for so-called public figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are a private figure and The New York Times or the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes a lie about you, you simply have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation. The fact that the publisher didn\u2019t know or care that the statement was false is irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if you are a \u201cpublic figure,\u201d you not only have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation, but that the statement was made \u201cwith knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the definition of who is a public figure constantly has expanded since 1964.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Justice Neal Gorsuch explained in his own dissent from the denial of a writ of certiorari in the Berisha case, in which he joined Thomas in urging the court to reconsider the legal standard in libel and defamation cases, at first \u201cpublic figures\u201d meant only government officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, the definition was expanded to \u201cpublic figures\u201d outside government, then to those who have achieved \u201cpervasive fame or notoriety,\u201d and then to \u201climited\u201d public figures \u201cwho voluntarily inject\u201d themselves or are \u201cdrawn into a particular public controversy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, this definition of \u201cpublic figure\u201d is so expansive that the only issue is who it doesn\u2019t cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Thomas <\/a>correctly observes in his most recent dissent, this double standard has no basis in \u201cthe text, history, or structure of the Constitution.\u201d The decision in New York Times v. Sullivan \u201cand the court\u2019s [other] decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what has been the result? According to Thomas<\/a>, and to anyone who has been paying attention to the outrageous lies and misrepresentations\u2014especially about conservatives\u2014that we see regularly on CNN, MSNBC, and other far-left media organizations, some persons and media outlets can \u201ccast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of Coral Ridge Ministries, the Southern Poverty Law Center \u201clumped\u201d in the Christian organization with real hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, Thomas writes. SPLC put the ministry on \u201can interactive, online \u2018Hate Map\u2019 and caused Coral Ridge concrete financial injury by excluding them from the AmazonSmile donation program.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the actual malice standard \u201cthis court has imposed,\u201d Thomas writes, \u201cCoral Ridge could not hold SPLC to account for what it maintains is a blatant falsehood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the supposed logic behind the Supreme Court\u2019s creation of this standard fails. As Thomas explains, the court \u201cprovides scant explanation for the decision to erect a new hurdle for public-figure plaintiffs so long after the First Amendment\u2019s ratification.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One explanation was that false claims against private individuals are more serious that those against public figures, who are fair targets because they \u201cinvite attention and comment.\u201d But as Thomas says, the \u201ccommon law deemed libels against public figures to be \u2026 more<\/em> serious and injurious than ordinary libels.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, Thomas writes, it \u201cis unclear why exposing oneself to an increased risk of becoming a victim [as a public figure] necessarily means forfeiting the remedies legislatures put in place for such victims.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas and Gorsuch make strong argument about the fundamental unfairness of the \u201cactual malice\u201d standard and the fact that there is no basis for it in the Constitution or our legal history. As Gorsuch wrote in his Berisha dissent:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[O]ver time the actual malice standard has evolved from a high bar to recovery into an effective immunity from liability. \u2026 The bottom line? It seems that publishing without<\/em> investigation, fact-checking, or editing has become the optimal legal strategy. Under the actual malice regime as it has evolved, \u2018ignorance is bliss.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

No wonder so many Americans distrust<\/a> what they hear in the \u201cnews.\u201d The public knows that the media can get away with printing or saying just about anything they want, no matter how false or malicious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Joe Biden and his liberal compatriots in politics, the media, and social media constantly are crowing about \u201cmisinformation.\u201d Although the type of censorship they seem to support is not the answer, reconsideration of the legal standard governing defamation, as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpcat-1-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfawbn.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}