News & Opinion

In a ruling favoring the election technology company Smartmatic, a justice of the New York Supreme Court ruled that company could proceed in its libel lawsuit against Fox News. Fox hosts and guests alleged Smartmatic fixed the election to defeat former President Donald Trump. “…Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for

George Freeman and Lee Levine, The Washington Post, March 8, 2022, cite a comprehensive study of Times v. Sullivan by the Media Law Resource Center that mounts a staunch defense in favor of keeping Sullivan in place. Freeman and Levine write that there has been an increase in libel lawsuits brought by politicians, officials and corporate figures, not usually for injury to reputation or loss of earnings but to punish the media for speaking the

Ukraine is pleading with social media companies to take strong measures to restrict access to services within Russia, stop the spread of lies and put the whammy on Russian-backed news outlets. The prime ministers of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia sent a letter to Google, Facebook and Twitter noting their efforts to curtail Russian lies but asking for a greater effort to suspend accounts that deny or rationalize war crimes and crimes against humanity. (The

Federal agencies dealing with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests are famously credited with stonewalling and denying and sometimes not even delivering documents. Other times the data is turned over without organization making it difficult for journalists to extract any meaningful conclusions. A team at New York University has developed an artificial-intelligence tool to help sort through documents by relevance to the topic of investigation. (Columbia Journalism Review, March 2,2022, by Paroma Soni) For

FIRE reports that attacks on professors on ideological grounds totaled 111 in 2021, most of the incidents originating from the political left of the professor. Over 60 percent of the incidents resulted in sanctions, including investigations, suspensions and terminations. (Freedom for Individual Rights in Education, March 2, 2022, press release) Academic freedom is under assault particularly over the teaching about race and racism. Texas Lt Governor Dan Patrick is proposing to yank the tenure of