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Scalia argued his view on “textualism” was the ultimate defense of the First Amendment. In March 2012, an Associated Press report said he told an audience at Wesleyan University that the Court’s early justices would be “astonished that the notion of the Constitution changes to mean whatever each successive generation would like it to mean. … In fact, it would be not much use to have a First Amendment, for example, if the freedom of speech included only what some future generation wanted it to include. That would guarantee nothing at all.” That opinion didn’t prevent Scalia from harsh criticism of what is widely viewed as one of the essential court rulings protecting free speech and a free press — the 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. At the Newseum in the Aspen Institute 2011 Washington Ideas Forum, Scalia said the landmark ruling meant “you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not. “Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia said. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’” But in Times v. Sullivan, Scalia said the Supreme Court, under Justice Earl Warren, “… simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.’”
JUSTICE SCALIA: THE 45 WORDS — AND ORIGINAL MEANING — OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

“Half the truth is often a great lie” - Benjamin Franklin
Since nobody ever tells the whole truth - “Ain’t nobody got time for that” - the attitude and perspective of the writer has to color any report.
The decision to withdraw rather than correct a story when the villain of the piece turns out to be a Democrat instead of a Republican simply reveals that the editor of the publication favors the Democrat Party. There’s no law against that - and there shouldn’t be, and under the First Amendment there can’t be. But.
The actual problem is the existence of the journalism cartel, spontaneously generated by the wire services and empowered by the Warren Court’s unanimous - unanimously wrong - 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision.
Objection to the claim that American journalism is a cartel is fatuous. Evidence which can be criticized as “anecdotal“ abounds, but what cannot be refuted is that the wire services constitute continual virtual meetings of all major US journalism. “Meetings” which began before the Civil War and are ongoing with not end in sight. The logical implication is drawn by Adam Smith: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It is naive to believe that journalists whose entire culture is defined by meeting among themselves about business - and who belong to organizations with names like “Associated” Press or “United” Press International - would not take behavior which is actually “conspiracy against the public” for granted as unexceptionable “business as usual.”
The wire services and their member/subscriber outlets are wide open for antitrust suits or prosecution.
To see the “conspiracy against the public,” it is logical to evaluate the actual business model of journalism. Journalism is actually about bad news. Consequently journalism is systematically negative - which naturally tends to imply that “the government should do something” about one situation or another. Journalism is negative towards society, but claims to be objective. But claiming that “negativity is objectivity” is nothing if not a description of cynicism.
The cartel’s claim of objectivity has the effect of redefining “objectivity” to mean cynicism towards society (and naiveté towards government). The cartel systematically rejects applying the term “objective” to anyone outside the cartel - and systematically labels that member of the cartel “objective.” But the cynical conspiracy doesn’t end there; the cartel also redefines every politically positive adjective - starting with “liberal,” but including “centrist,” “moderate,” and “progressive” - to mean exactly what they make “objective” mean (differing from “objective" only in the usage the cartel will allow).
The cartel eliminates ideological competition among journalists. The Sullivan decision - which eliminates libel suits by Republican government officials (“liberals” obviously don’t get libeled) - entitles “liberals” and “objective journalists” not only to their own opinions but to their own facts. And that is the engine of Political Correctness; Republicans are denied any peaceable venue to establish facts not congenial to “liberals.”
The fallacy of the Sullivan decision is that it justifies itself with the claim that ‘'libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” One is tempted to take that at face value, but Antonin Scalia pointed out that The Bill of Rights was intentionally structured not to compromise the right to sue for libel. The purpose of the entire BoR was to assure everyone that the Constitution did not compromise any right; the great project of the creation of the strong Federal Government depended on the success of that project. The Ninth Amendment practically says exactly that, and the wording “the freedom . . . of the press” in the First Amendment refers to traditional freedom of the press as traditionally limited (by libel and pornography laws, for example).