More than any other institution, the Supreme Court has shaped the social, political, and civil life of Americans.
He has ruled on the death penalty —first against and then in favor— or on abortion —first in favor and then against.
However, there is a field in which their sentences have always gone in the same direction: freedom of the press, thanks to the First Amendment that decrees that "Congress may not make any law (...) limiting freedom of expression, nor of press”.
Even very conservative judging panels have been forced to be tolerant on that ground.
The late
New York Times
journalist Anthony Lewis, who covered the Supreme Court for decades, wrote in his essay
Freedom
—a history of the First Amendment, a legal text enacted in 1791—that “America's commitment to free speech it is very interesting because it emerges from a particularly repressive society”, the England of the Reformation and the Europe that later mobilized against the effects of the French Revolution.
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Tucker Carlson and Fox News break after lawsuit for spreading Trump's big lie
The First Amendment explains some sentences that stand as legal monuments in favor of free speech.
The
case Hustler Magazine v.
Falwell
(1988)—very well recounted in the movie
The Hustle of Larry Flynt
,
by Milos Forman—is one of those references: the pornography mogul was exonerated of insulting and mocking Reverend Falwell: he had published a cartoon in which he had drunken sex with his mother in a latrine.
In the film, the speech of his lawyer, played by Edward Norton, before the magistrates is especially emotional: “I am not trying to suggest that they should like what Larry Flynt does.
I don't like it, but what I do want is to live in a country where we, you and I, are the ones who can make the decision”.
But there is another, even more interesting sentence, which marked Dominion's recent lawsuit against the ultra-conservative chain Fox, which it accused of deliberately lying when holding this company responsible (without evidence and against all evidence) for having manipulated the electoral result.
This is
The New York Times v.
L.B. Sullivan
(1964).
Sullivan, a Montgomery police commissioner, denounced the newspaper for an ad that was aimed at raising funds for the defense of Martin Luther King (who was a pastor in the Alabama capital between 1954 and 1960).
The text contained some inaccuracies: it stated, for example, that King was arrested seven times, when in fact he was arrested four times.
The anti-newspaper environment in the Old South was so hostile that, during the trial, his lawyer had to hide in a motel 25 miles from Montgomery because he was at risk of being lynched, according to Lewis
.
However, the Supreme Court ended up agreeing with
The New York Times.
The judges held that journalists have the right to make mistakes and that making a newspaper without errors would be impossible.
His description of the job is reminiscent of that old definition drawn up by David Randall in
The Universal Journalist:
"All newspapers should publish a clarifying note in all their editions that should read: 'This newspaper, and the hundreds of thousands of words it contains, have They have been produced in approximately 15 hours by a group of fallible human beings, who from work tables cluttered with things try to find out what has happened in the world, resorting to people who are sometimes reluctant to tell them and others decidedly opposed to doing so.
The ruling says that for defamation to occur there must be bad faith
(actual malice)
and that the burden of proof must fall on the person allegedly defamed.
"A law that would force the criticism of the behavior of officials to guarantee the truth of all the statements regarding facts leads to something similar to self-censorship" maintains the sentence, which defends that "freedom of expression allows the rest of the liberties”.
Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes in 'The Loudest Voice'.
All of Fox's hopes in its Dominion lawsuit rested on this judgment;
although in the end they reached an agreement for which they paid 787 million dollars to the company, convinced that they had a very difficult time because dozens of internal emails showed that the presenters and executives of the chain were aware of their lies and that Donald Trump he had lost the elections.
The documentation made it very clear that there was bad faith and deliberate lies brand of the house.
Relying on the Supreme Court rulings, which represent a beacon for freedom of expression throughout the world, the Fox chain was able to grow and multiply thanks to a tolerance that it denied to others.
A film —
The Scandal
— and a series —
The Loudest Voice
— showed the toxic environment that existed in the chain, dominated by its founder, Roger Ailes, who ended up being fired for sexual abuse, like the star presenter Bill O 'Reilly.
But they also showed the enormous power that he achieved in the conservative sectors of the United States. And his absolute contempt for the truth: Ailes's objective was not to tell what was happening, but what his viewers wanted to hear.
He undermined some of the institutions on which a democratic society rests: agreement on facts, disagreement on policy.
The lies that numerous Spanish media and politicians spread about, for example, the perpetrators of the 11-M attacks are pure Fox school. Their legacy is an endless trail of lies that reaches us.
And nothing indicates that, once the corresponding check has been signed —reminiscent of Pepe Isbert's speech in
Bienvenido mister Marshall:
"As your mayor that I am, I owe you an explanation and that explanation that I owe you I am going to pay you"—, do not go on the same path.
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