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The American view is that there are inevitable journalistic errors if we want to give freedom of expression the “breathing space” it needs. The idea is to allow most speech, including some false statements, to be vetted in the “marketplace of ideas.”
In medieval England, as in other cultures, duels, armed raids and other violent retaliation were regarded as natural, honorable responses to defamation.” A peaceful alternative was needed, and so the king's court criminalized political or seditious statements against aristocrats. The law evolved as time went on, but this English notion of criminalizing political or seditious libel was on the minds of those who drafted the U.S. Constitution.
Even in the U.S. there was briefly a law, the Sedition Act of 1798, that made it a crime to write or speak anything “false, scandalous and malicious” against the United States government. If you could prove the allegation was true, you would not be penalized. The Act was attacked as unconstitutional. It expired by its own terms in 1801, but not before it had crystallized the idea that discussion of public matters was guaranteed by the Constitution and that neither good-faith errors nor even libels could overcome this right.
. . . Back to Trump: Would he like to be sued by George W. Bush for claiming that Bush lied to get us to go to war in Iraq? We lose if we suppress speech that in some cases can avert threats to our safety or prevent bad policy.
Ironically, the media itself interferes with its own freedom when for example, out of cultural sensitivity, it describes "jihadist attacks on American citizens at home as ‘work-related accidents’ and, elsewhere, as ‘militant attacks.’" The idea that Islam inspires these attacks is not one that the media wants to spread.
Freedom of speech is not a universal value. Jihadists don't believe in it, Marxists don't believe in it, dictators and their henchmen don't believe in it. Given that it is a core American value, we should be willing to be different than much of the world and accept the tradeoffs that go with it.
