SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Grey Wall of Silence: Trump Is Right About Newspaper Libel Laws
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“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” Donald Trump said recently. “And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.” Yes, Trump is a jerk. True, he himself is the Slanderer-in-Chief. Granted, he’s a bit of a fascist. Pertinently, libel laws are state laws. Neither the president nor Congress can change them. But even an authoritarian hypocrite is right sometimes. And Trump is dead right that the nation’s libel laws are “a sham and a disgrace.” My defamation lawsuit against The Los Angeles Times is a case study. (I’ve written about the merits of my case elsewhere. Here, I ask you to simply consider the process of lodging a complaint and taking it to a jury to…
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