Notable First Amendment News

The MSM has for too long gotten what amounts to a free pass to attack conservatives without consequences--or regard for the truth. Will those days be coming to an end. Two ongoing cases may be too early to say whether the law will change, simply because the press misbehavior may have been so egregious that even under past kid gloves treatment it went too far. Still, the prospect of both the NYT and the WaPo being deposed and subjected to wide ranging discovery is delicious to contemplate.

Zerohedge provides a roundup from a variety of sources.

You may have heard of Project Veritas' recent victory against the NYT:

The New York Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Project Veritas in its lawsuit against the New York Times.

Project Veritas will be permitted to depose the New York Times.

A motion for a stay was denied.

Project Veritas sued the New York Times for claiming their Minnesota ballot harvesting video was “deceptive.” (TGP)

Now Devin Nunes has also been given permission to depose the WaPo in his defamation suit. This is somewhat interesting. The WaPo tried to claim that their correction of their defamatory statements proved that they had no actual malice against Nunes. That didn't work, because their defamatory statements followed an article in which the WaPo had actually published the truth (!) about Nunes. The judge ruled that, having initially published the truth, it was clear that the WaPo really did know the truth, so the later defamatory statements on the same matter were probative of--at a minimum--reckless disregard of the truth:

The paper said in its motion to dismiss that its correction erased any claims to malice, but U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols rejected that argument.

“A newspaper’s own prior (and correct) reporting that is inconsistent with its later (and incorrect) reporting could certainly give the paper reason to seriously doubt the truth of its later publication—just as a source’s pre-publication recantation may be evidence that a publisher had reason to doubt the source’s original claims,” Nichols, a Trump nominee, wrote in his Aug. 11 decision.

“Later in this case, Nunes will have to establish by clear and convincing evidence that, even in light of the corrections the Post did issue, it published its statements with actual malice. But for now, he has sufficiently pleaded that, in November 2020, the Post published its article with at least reckless disregard of the truth that it had previously reported,” he added. (Epoch Times)

In the meantime the case moves forward. Let the depositions begin!