By Elizabeth Tharakan >> National news organizations embolden President Donald Trump to sue them when they pay out million dollar settlements to Trump when his legal claims are weak and probably would fail in court. That is the consensus of media lawyers and scholars. The media organizations are surrendering the legal protections that New York
By Jackie Spinner Before most college students in 2024 were born, the Pew Research Center was already reporting that young readers had turned away from newspapers. Older readers had not fully embraced online news yet in 2002. Only a quarter of them went to the internet for their news and then only three times a
Newspapers are dying. Young people aren’t reading them. Predatory hedge funds are buying them up, laying off reporters, milking them for profits and cutting home delivery. The result is that democracy is losing its eyes and ears and maybe its conscience. That was a theme of Rick Goldsmith’s new documentary on the predatory consequences of
Two major defamation cases against Jim Hoft, the St. Louisan who publishes The Gateway Pundit, an influential far-right website, appear poised to gain momentum in the weeks ahead after months of delays. The cases, in Denver and St. Louis, are taking place against a backdrop of huge victories recently by the plaintiffs in two other
The point of the First Amendment is to protect expression people hate – Nazi protesters in Skokie, anti-war protesters burning the American flag, KKK hooligans in an Ohio farmfield, Christian fundamentalists protesting the burial of American soldiers. Tolerance for the speech we despise is the lesson of 232 years of the First Amendment. Yet the
