YOU will be vilified, ridiculed, denounced, unfairly criticized if not “defamed” by your political opponents and their supporters. And there is nothing new about that in the history of politics. It was much worse in the past. (Julius Caesar’s political opponents did not even try to debate him. They just stabbed him to death — in the Senate chamber.) Today, with social media, it’s easier to launch “negative attacks” against politicians and elected officials. But then again, with social media, it is also easier to learn about such attacks and to refute, disprove and counter them. Back then, as they say, a lie could travel around the globe while the truth was still pressing the snooze button on his alarm clock.
In his amusing book, “How to Get Elected,” Jack Mitchell pointed out that although almost every U.S. president has complained about the media’s unfair and unflattering coverage, “the modern chief executives had it easy compared to George Washington….” As historian Thomas Flexner has noted, “Probably no man in American history suffered more than Washington from newspaper libels, from a reviving of old lies and the concoction of new ones with a wild irresponsibility that American mores would not accept today.” The great man’s response? “To persevere in one’s duty and be silent, is the best answer to calumny.” Eventually, however, he heeded what a future president would say about the heat and the kitchen, and got out of it.
Today, those who style themselves as “purveyors of truth” can remain vigilant by going online most of the time. They can be notified instantly whenever their candidate’s name is mentioned anywhere in the world. They can easily reply to “misrepresentations” as quickly as these are posted. In the states and other countries, the major political parties and candidates for office have rapid-response and rapid-attack teams online 24/7.
There was never a “golden age” in politics when political rivals were always civil to each other, and did not resort to “negative” campaigning. In the NMI back in the day, historian Don A. Farrell said distributing “photocopies of rumor sheets was a very popular campaign tactic, as was verbal rumor-spreading.”
Re-reading the post-election back issues of this newspaper, you will come across candidates and concerned citizens complaining about the “unprecedented mudslinging,” the “vicious slanders,” the “new low” in “negative campaigning” that had “marred” a recently held election. As the English (and leftist) historian E.P. Thomson supposedly said, “Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.”
In any case, in this era of social media, the more high-profile you are the more likely you will be trolled relentlessly. There’s no getting around it. Even the repressed citizens of China and Russia could find ways to avoid their government’s online censors.
As a politician, you have two options: ignore the trolls and consider their sorry existence as part of the job, like being heckled or getting pelted with tomatoes. Or you can rebut them as tirelessly as they hurl their attacks. You have a campaign committee; it can designate someone or a group of people for the task.
Whining and complaining about “unfair attacks” won’t cut it. Voters may even wonder about your ability to deal with the CNMI’s huge and persistent problems. You say you want to take on the challenges of governance, but you can’t deal with a scurrilous online comment?
As for what constitutes libel under U.S. law, there’s a lot of literature about it online. You may also want a detailed account of the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan case, which established important precedents for libel law and freedom of the press in the U.S. Check out the book “Make No Law” by legal journalist Anthony Lewis. He mentioned, among other things, the legal brief filed by the NY Times that quoted Justice Hugo Black’s statement about the “prized American privilege to speak one’s mind, although not always with perfect good taste.” Lewis also quoted one of Judge Learned Hand’s aphorisms on free speech: The First Amendment “pre-supposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through a kind of authoritative selections. To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all.”
According to Lewis, the NYT brief argued that political speech cannot, constitutionally, be punished because it is false. “It is clear [that political debate] is not delimited by any test of truth, to be administered by juries, courts or by executive officials, not to speak of a test which puts the burden of establishing truth upon the writer.”
In the Sullivan case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that America has a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials….”
Free speech, to be sure, is not absolute. There are laws against defamation. And online comments posted by private entities such as this newspaper are subject to rules and moderation.
Still, to quote Justice Lewis Powell Jr., “Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.”
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