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From VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow: "Still, I wrote last year, there were heartening signs that Sullivan decision is—after nearly sixty years—finally collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
In this prediction, at least, I have been vindicated by two subsequent major developments:
D.C. Circuit Senior Judge Laurence Silberman’s outspoken March 19 dissent [PDF] in a libel case, explicitly calling for Sullivan to be overturned.
Silberman really alarmed the media elite here, as you can tell from Politico’s headline:
Federal judge pens dissent slamming decades-old press protections: D.C. Circuit Senior Judge Laurence Silberman’s diatribe amounted to an assault on a Supreme Court decision that set the framework for modern defamation law [by Josh Gerstein, March 19, 2021].
But he has added new strength to a debate begun by Justice Thomas. Both Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds and Alan Dershowitz have responded with suggested reforms.
Project Veritas’ victory over the New York Times in New York State court on essentially the same defamation point that we had raised in federal court.
This dramatic development is well summarized here: Project Veritas Wins Early Round In Defamation Lawsuit Against New York Times, By Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist, March 22, 2021. A key point is that Judge Charles Wood of the New York State Supreme Court rejected [PDF] the New York Times’ claim that anything factual in its news reports can be defended as merely an expression of opinion.
The New York Times had, of course, attempted to urge Judge Wood to adopt the decision in our case as persuasive. But he would have none of it and refused to follow the poor logic of the decision in our case. (We hope the Second Circuit appellate judges do likewise!)
Needless to say, the New York Times, which has a lot of money, is appealing. But unless this decision is reversed, Project Veritas will now be able to proceed to discovery i.e. get its hands on internal communications between New York Times editors and writers.
Based on my own experience of 40 years in the Main Stream Media, I cannot imagine that that the New York Times views this with anything other but dread.
Naturally, I wish that we had prevailed in Federal District Court with the same arguments that worked for Project Veritas in New York State court, and I hope we will prevail on appeal. But Project Veritas’ heroic success, on which I congratulate the heroic James O’Keefe with all my heart, does show that VDARE.com’s crusade is not at all quixotic.
Nevertheless, the next step is still the same: more litigation. I must appeal to you to help us (tax-deductibly, unless and until the Biden Regime cracks down on us) NOW!!!
Litigation is notoriously uncertain. And the political environment is unprecedentedly hostile. I don’t know if we, or Project Veritas, can prevail and reverse the Sullivan License To Lie. But someone must—if American public discourse, and the Historic American Nation, is to survive."
(read the rest here)
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