In January 1985, the late Ariel Sharon was taught a hard lesson by the American justice system when he unsuccessfully sued TIME magazine for libel in U.S. federal court. That case, which made headlines for weeks at the time and had an impact on both Israeli politics and American law, is largely forgotten. But it was called to mind by the surprising decision of ABC News to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by President-elect Donald Trump.

ABC will pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library and pay $1 million in legal fees to the past and future president’s lawyers. In addition to the money, the network and host George Stephanopoulos were forced to express “regret” for statements he made alleging that Trump had been “found liable for rape,” when that was not true.

The network’s decision to settle the lawsuit and apologize was greeted with dismay by just about everyone in the liberal corporate media. They see it as a surrender on the part of the Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, to Trump. Placed alongside the efforts of other corporate giants to mend fences with the president-elect in the aftermath of his victory in the 2024 election, liberals fear that it will “normalize” Trump—the man most of them were busy falsely labeling as an authoritarian bent on the destruction of American democracy just a couple of months ago in a vain effort to boost the doomed campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris. To journalists who see themselves as part of the anti-Trump “resistance,” the realization of their corporate masters that it’s time to pivot back to the center rather than doubling down on a failed partisan cause is a disaster.

The press loses credibility

They also believe that it will encourage Trump to take revenge on his political opponents with unfounded lawsuits. The liberal media worries that all this might somehow lead to the overturning of the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court ruling that made it difficult, if not impossible, for public figures to sue for libel. Many journalists think that if they are stripped of that legal shield, the freedom of the press will be doomed, especially with a president in the White House with a grudge against the media.

But it’s not as simple as that. The high bar set by the Supreme Court does give American journalists more freedom than almost all of their counterparts elsewhere. It was handed down in an era when the press was far more respected than it is today. If journalists in the liberal corporate press are feeling the heat from a public that is abandoning legacy outlets for podcasts and other alternative media, it’s not just a function of Trump’s desire to get even with his opponents. It’s because in the last decade, many, if not most of them, have abandoned any semblance of journalistic ethics in favor of liberal political activism.

Leading outlets relentlessly promoted the Russia collusion hoax against Trump, despite the flimsy premise behind it and the lack of proof that ultimately exposed it as a fraudulent conspiracy theory. They colluded with the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to bury coverage of the corruption of President Joe Biden’s family in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign. Equally egregious was their conspicuous failure to do any substantial reporting about Biden’s growing incapacity as president, covering up his diminishing ability to function right up until his disastrous June debate with Trump, when it became impossible to conceal it any further. Just as bad was the scorn they heaped on anyone who did point out the truth about Biden until it became in the interests of the Democrats to replace him with Harris.

There are many other examples of this sort of bias, but suffice it to say that while his colleagues took the side of Stephanopoulos in the dispute with Trump, much of the public, which sees the ABC host as a symbol of the arrogance, partisanship and hypocrisy of the media disagrees (he was, after all, the point man for discrediting women who came forward with credible allegations of sexual harassment and assault against former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s).

There is also good reason to think that Trump’s latest lawsuit will fail. He’s pursuing a claim against the Des Moines Register and its supposedly expert pollster J. Ann Selzer for publishing a last-minute poll showing Harris winning the state of Iowa, which was 17 percentage points off the actual result. The poll finding was so skewed and its timing so suspicious that it might well be considered election interference, even if it probably isn’t illegal. Trump’s lawsuit should fail, but the facts of the case do lend credence to the claim that the media is not only not to be trusted but may well be deliberately lying to the public.

^{Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during a meeting in Jerusalem. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90.}

Media bias against Israel

A new generation of journalists, largely educated in elite universities, is steeped in the toxic ideas of the left like critical race theory and intersectionality, and now believe their job is to advance “progressive” causes, not to tell both sides of stories and seek out the truth. Not thoroughly reporting the whole story happens in some conservative media as well.

That has played out not only with respect to American politics but also when it comes to reporting about Israel, and its conflict with the Palestinians and Iranian-backed terrorists. In the nearly 15 months since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, corporate media has skewed coverage against the Jewish state, and its efforts to defend itself and defeat those who seek its destruction. Still, it’s worth remembering it was the Sharon case and during the 1982 Lebanon War when it first became clear that Israel could no longer expect fair coverage.

Sharon sued TIME—then one of the best-read and most powerful media outlets in the world—for libel. The case involved a 1982 article that alleged that Sharon, then-Israel’s Defense Minister, had told Lebanese Phalangist leaders to take revenge on Palestinians by going into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. The upshot of the report, widely believed at the time, was that Sharon was responsible for the subsequent massacre in which the Phalangists had taken revenge for the Palestinian slaughter of Lebanese Christians.

As it happened, he had done no such thing, and as such, sued for libel in federal court for the media leviathan falsely labeling him a “mass murderer.” But his main obstacle to vindication in court was U.S. libel law, which makes it very difficult for plaintiffs who are public figures to seek redress against the press, no matter the strength of their cases.

During the course of the trial, Sharon’s lawyers proved to the jury that the report was false. But his problem was that the judge properly charged it under the Times v. Sullivan rules and said that they must answer three questions: Was the story true? Did the reporter know it was not true? And had the report been published out of malice in a willful desire to injure Sharon? The jury answered “yes” to the first two questions. However, in the absence of a clear admission on the part of Time’s staff that they were out to get the Israeli war hero and politician, the answer to the third question was “no.” And so, TIME won.

Both sides claimed vindication with Sharon insisting that all he wanted was to prove that the allegation was a lie, not the $50 million he had asked for in damages. He subsequently forced the magazine to agree to a financial settlement in a later and separate lawsuit in an Israeli court, where the laws are not skewed to favor the press.

Though the furor over his alleged responsibility for Sabra and Shatila forced his resignation as defense minister, Sharon eventually made a remarkable political comeback. He became prime minister of Israel in 2001 and served until he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006 that led to his death eight years later. But the damage to his reputation—and that of the Jewish state—lingered outside of Israel. It’s possible to argue that the misleading and often downright false reporting about Lebanon in 1982 laid the foundation for the libelous coverage of the Jewish state today, as false claims of “genocide” against Palestinians are routinely aired in the international media and believed by those who have been indoctrinated to believe it is a “white” oppressor state.

The corporate press may deny that as a whole, they have abandoned traditional journalistic ethics in favor of liberal activism. But the blatant bias against Trump and conservatives, as well as its predilection for defaming Israel, is the context with which we should view the current debate about a pending assault on the American press. The same can be said of almost all of the Israeli media that treat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the same unfairness as their American counterparts do to Trump.

Change the law?

As the Sharon case proved 40 years ago, the current standards for libel in the United States are questionable. One wonders whether he might have proved malice in an era when virtually all communication is conducted via email and text and can be subpoenaed in the legal discovery process. Yet in writing the First Amendment, the intent of the Founders of the American Republic was not to give blanket immunity to journalists to lie about public figures. Seen from that point of view, the Supreme Court might well have good reason to revisit the Times v. Sullivan precedent to make it easier to sue, as is the case in other democracies.

But you don’t have to be at the Times, ABC or any of the other legacy outlets that have thrown away their credibility in the eyes of the public to worry about the implications of such a development.

The owners of many supposedly mainstream outlets are, with good reason, rethinking allowing their woke staff to cut them off from at least the half of the public that doesn’t lean to the left. Attempting to steer them back to the center is not a surrender to authoritarianism but a sensible decision to discard partisanship and return to the more responsible journalistic culture that was part of the court’s reasoning in Times v. Sullivan.

Still, lowering the bar to lawsuits won’t hurt these massive corporations. What it will do is to make alternative media—whether small outlets like JNS or the independent podcasters who have largely supplanted the corporate media—more vulnerable. They don’t have hot-shot lawyers on retainer or the resources to defend themselves against spiteful and frivolous litigation that the media giants have.

The real answer to the threat of Trump’s lawsuits is not to change the law but for journalists to do their jobs rather than playing politics as so many of them now think is their duty. If the corporate media continues on this current path, the problem won’t just be that Trump or other wronged conservatives will sue them and potentially undermine the First Amendment’s protection of the press. It’s that they will lose even more of their audiences and influence. The same is true in Israel as the one alternative to the left’s groupthink—Channel 14—continues to gain viewers. As with so many other things in free societies, the answer is to let the public, acting through the free market, decide the fate of legacy outlets. In the long run, journalists who think they should have impunity to defame their political opponents will fail, and those who tell the truth may well succeed.

Source: JNS