Over the weekend, while President Donald Trump was in Japan to meet with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe regarding trade, a journalist and professor decided to report some fake news.
Ian Bremmer, a Time Magazine columnist and New York University professor, tweeted: “President Trump in Tokyo: ‘Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden.'”
When pressed about the quote, Bremmer replied: “This is objectively a completely ludicrous quote. And yet kinda plausible. Especially on twitter, where people automatically support whatever political position they have.”
He finally revealed that he made up the quote. Bremmer eventually deleted the tweet and apologized:
“My tweet yesterday about Trump preferring Kim Jong Un to Biden as President was meant in jest. The President correctly quoted me as saying it was a ‘completely ludicrous’ statement. I should have been clearer. My apologies.”
This prompted the president to come out swinging and demand new libel laws, something he has previously called for.
Trump wrote on Twitter: “People think they can say anything and get away with it. Really, the libel laws should be changed to hold Fake News Media accountable!”
While it was clearly another example of fake news, do we really need new and/more libel laws?
Legendary economist Walter Block might have something to say about that (courtesy of “Defending the Undefendable”):
“Now, there is perhaps nothing more repugnant or vicious than libel. We must, therefore, take particular care to defend the free speech rights of libelers, for if they can be protected, the rights of all others — who do not give as much offense — will certainly be more secure. But if the rights of free speech of libelers and slanderers are not protected, the rights of others will be less secure.
“The reason civil libertarians have not been involved in the protection of the rights of libelers and slanderers is clear — libel is ruinous to reputations. Harsh tales about lost jobs, friends, etc., abound. Far from being concerned with the free speech rights of the libeler and slanderer, civil libertarians have been concerned with protecting those who have had their reputations destroyed, as though that in itself was unpardonable. But obviously, protecting a person’s reputation is not an absolute value.
“If it were, if, that is, reputations were really sacrosanct, then we would have to prohibit most categories of denigration, even truthful ones. Unfavorable literary criticism, satire in movies, plays, music or book reviews could not be allowed. Anything which diminished any individual’s or any institution’s reputation would have to be forbidden…
“… what is a person’s ‘reputation’? … Clearly, it is not a possession which may be said to belong to him in the way, for example, his clothes do. In fact, a person’s reputation does not ‘belong’ to him at all. A person’s reputation is what other people think of him; it consists of the thoughts which other people have.
“A man does not own his reputation any more than he owns the thoughts of others — because that is all his reputation consists of. A man’s reputation cannot be stolen from him any more than can the thoughts of other people be stolen from him.”
“Whether his reputation was ‘taken from him’ by fair means or foul, by truth or falsehood, he did not own it in the first place and, hence, should have no recourse to the law for damages.
“What then are we doing when we object to, or prohibit, libel? We are prohibiting someone from affecting or trying to affect the thoughts of other people. But what does the right of free speech mean if not that we are all free to try to affect the thoughts of those around us? So we must conclude that libel and slander are consistent with the rights of free speech.”
We would like nothing more than to punish the mainstream media and hold them accountable for the lies they spew on a regular basis, but doing so would potentially require expanding the size and scope of the state.
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