The Fake-News Media Has a Big Problem.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: MASS MEDIA

DEPUTY general counsel at The New York Times, David E. McCraw provides legal counsel concerning libel, freedom of information, court access, litigation, and news gathering. Also an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School, McCraw provides pro bono counsel for freedom of the press around the world. In this contentious era when a president calls the media "the enemy of the people," McCraw resolutely defends the First Amendment in Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts.

Neither an "abstract treatise" on the First Amendment nor a "blind rant" against Pres. Donald Trump, the book alerts Americans that the nation's tradition of free speech cannot survive subverted as a vehicle for advancing some political agenda. When the President "demands laws be changed to rein in the First Amendment" and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani declares "truth isn't truth," citizens need to remember press freedom matters: journalists must have freedom to expose "inconvenient truths," challenge government, and reveal excesses of big companies. Freedom of the press never has been more important to democracy than it is now.

Between McCraw's joining the Times in 2002 and the 2016 presidential campaign, striking changes occurred in journalism. The Times left the broadcast industry and sold its other newspapers in order to focus on providing global news. The paper faced ruthless competition, partisanship, and a "cultural war" over the very nature of truth.

Unnerved by 9/11, the government allowed secrecy to pervade all of its levels. Reporters worked doubly hard to gain access to classified information about "surveillance of Americans, government misconduct, and misguided foreign policies." However, government attempts at secrecy also were met with leaks of "startling proportion and audacity." All the while reporters met with tweeting; a new form of journalism practiced by a president with a cell phone.

The press survived the bruising 2016 campaign, but it faced the uncertainties of Trump's presidency. Trump demanded changes in libel laws in order to sue more easily; he encouraged crowds to "jeer at working journalists"; he termed challenges to his honesty, popularity, or ethics "fake news"; and he created "alternative facts" to cover inconvenient truths. Every aspect of freedom of the press--its value, necessity, and centrality to democracy--came "under siege."

However, the 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, set legal parameters to preclude "fat cats and plutocrats" using libel suits as a legal extortion racket...