A Florida bill introduced last week would make it easier to successfully sue news media for defamation, with several provisions that defy landmark Supreme Court rulings on First Amendment rights.
The legislation, filed by Rep. Alex Andrade, comes weeks after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a roundtable discussion on what he described as the impact of defamatory reporting by news media companies. During that discussion, DeSantis accused legacy news outlets of increasingly favoring “preferred narratives” over truth.
“We’ve seen countless examples in recent history of members of the journalism profession playing fast and loose with facts,” Andrade said in a phone call. “I don’t believe that journalists have more or special privilege to be protected against the harm that they cause when they act recklessly or negligently.”
His bill, HB 991, aims to limit the actual malice requirement that has traditionally allowed journalists some room for error so that they’re not pressured to self-censor while holding powerful people accountable. The term “actual malice” refers to the idea that someone acted on information they knew to be false, or with disregard for the accuracy of that information.
“I don’t think it’s surprising at all that in Florida we would adopt this piece of legislation,” said First Amendment expert Clay Calvert, a professor emeritus at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. “That’s because many conservatives don’t like the mainstream media, or what they perceive to be the liberal media.”
The most prominent recent defamation case accusing a news outlet of actual malice, however, involves conservative media. A court filing unsealed this month provided evidence that employees at Fox News knew the claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election propagated by then-President Donald Trump and many of his Republican allies, including several Fox News personalities, were false.
Since the landmark New York Times Co. v. Sullivan…
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