donal brown

The judge in Sarah Palin’s libel case versus The New York Times denied her request for a new trial with a rebuke that she did not provide any evidence that the Times was driven by actual malice. (HuffPost, May 31, 2022, by Larry Neumeister of The Associated Press) While the Times had admittedly made an error in connecting her statements to a mass shooting, federal district Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote, “a mistake is not

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suffered a major setback in his efforts to defend former President Donald Trump’s right to lie on social media. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Florida law prohibiting the platforms from banning political candidates violated social media companies’ First Amendment rights. The appellate judge wrote, “The government can’t tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it.” (MSN, May 31, 2022, by the

Just as with the Sandy Hook, Parkland and other mass shootings, false claims proliferated online about the shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The usual claim was that the shooting was staged but also that the gunman was living illegally in the U.S. or transgender. The claims block real discussion of the problem of gun violence and allow people to avoid reality and fix blame. (The Associated Press, May 26, 2022, by David

The Wall Street Journal hailed the recent 6-3 Supreme Court decision in FEC v. Cruz as a victory for free speech. The decision rejects a part of the McCain-Feingold law of 2002 limiting repayment of a loan by a candidate to his own campaign to $250,000. Justice Roberts wrote that the law burdened “core speech” (Herald Democrat, May 22, 2022, opinion by The Wall Street Journal) Ian Millhiser in Vox, May 16, 2022, writes that