Trump seizes on NYU professor’s (fabricated) tweet to push change of libel laws

President Trump on Monday seized on a New York University professor’s false tweet as an example of journalistic malpractice while calling for the U.S. to modify its libel laws to hold news media accountable.

In his early morning tweet while on an overseas trip to Japan, the president said a fake quote attributed to him by Ian Bremmer shows “what’s going on in the age of Fake News.”

“People think they can say anything and get away with it,” Trump wrote. “Really, the libel laws should be changed to hold Fake News Media accountable!”

Bremmer, who is the president and founder of Eurasia Group and a political science professor at NYC, got into trouble Sunday for tweeting a fake quote attributed to Trump.

“Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden,” Bremmer wrote in the now-deleted tweet, attributing it to Trump.

North Korea has labeled Biden a “fool of low IQ” and an “imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being” after the U.S. presidential hopeful recently called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a tyrant during a recent speech.

Bremmer later reportedly responded in a now-deleted tweet: “This is objectively a completely ludicrous quote. And yet kinda plausible. Especially on twitter, where people automatically support whatever political position they have. That's the point.”

Democrats go along and get along (quite well, I might add) with Establishment journalism. Consequently Democrats don’t get libeled.
It follows that the conceit of SCOTUS’s 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision - that public officials can’t sue for libel is - de facto, a holding that Republicans can’t sue for libel. And thus, that Democrats are entitled not only to their own opinions, but also to their own facts.
Some Republican has to sue “the media” - as, “the AP and its membership, and all other wire services” for libel and for violation of antitrust law. And demand that Sullivan - unanimous and enthusiastically concurred with as it was - to be declared bad precedent.
The First Amendment did not create freedom of the press, it preserved it - and also the rights of the people to sue for libel and slander, and the right of governments to censor pornography. The right of public officials to vindicate their reputations via libel suits inherently entails the defense of ordinary voters from being besmirched for voting for officials whose reputations are unjustly besmirched.
SCOTUS (in its Warren Court incarnation) created this mess, and SCOTUS must clean it up. Legislation wouldn’t help.

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