Defiant Federal Judge Calls Out the Media-Democrat Complex

By Andrew C. McCarthy April 3, 2021

One D.C. Circuit jurist pulled no punches as he sounded the alarm on ‘one-party control of the press and media.’   The flak only gets heavy when you’re over the target.” This oft-cited World War II fighter-pilot wisdom is the best way to understand the strident reaction to Judge Laurence Silberman, the formidable senior jurist on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as a result of the dissent he filed in a recent libel case.

In the course of controversially urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the foundation of its modern libel jurisprudence, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Judge Silberman had the audacity to notice that the mainstream media function as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. When this development is combined with the activist progressivism of Silicon Valley techies who control social-media platforms, the result, he concluded, is “one-party control of the press and media.” This “threat to a viable democracy” is apt to lead “to countervailing extremism” — hard to argue with that these days.

Silberman’s point was that, without constitutional justification, the Supreme Court’s judicially legislated federalization of libel law substantially enhanced the power of the press. New York Times v. Sullivan supplanted the traditional state common law of defamation with a rule, speciously claimed to be mandated by the First Amendment, that requires defamed public figures to prove actual malice — i.e., to prove that any libelous statements were intentionally false or made with reckless disregard for their falsity. 

This daunting burden makes it virtually impossible for public figures — including private persons who are transmogrified into celebrities by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence — to sue successfully, even in cases where they have been slandered with false information........To Read More...