In 1964, the New York Times was party to a landmark Supreme Court case that bore its name. New York Times v. Sullivan was an important victory for civil rights and it established broad protections against libel lawsuits that have protected generations of journalists. Today, the Times finds itself fending off libel lawsuits by making legal arguments that undermine the entire concept of factual reporting, and notable judges are now citing politically motivated hostility and eroding journalism standards as justification for rolling back the generous libel protections established over 50 years ago.
A New York state Supreme Court judge rebuked the Times last week for pioneering a novel defense against libel. The paper is now asserting it is entitled to assert opinions in news stories, without labeling or distinguishing the opinion from fact.
Last September, Project Veritas -- a conservative journalism outfit known for doing undercover and hidden-camera investigations -- released video purporting to expose an illegal vote brokering scheme. The story was centered on Minneapolis’ Somali immigrant community in the congressional district of controversial Democrat Ilhan Omar. In the videos, a Somali man recounts a scheme where men go door to door with absentee ballot paperwork, telling voters, “This year, you will vote for Ilhan. … When we sign the voting document and they fill it out is when they give us the money.”
In news stories last autumn, the Times called the report by Project Veritas “deceptive,” “disinformation,” and “false.” Project Veritas responded by suing the Times and two of its reporters, Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu, for defamation.
The Times’ initial coverage of the Project Veritas report began with this sentence: “A deceptive video released on Sunday by the conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University.”
