By Lawrence Landskroner

Newspapers have been allowed to permit falsehoods to be printed with a virtual guarantee of immunity by decisions rendered in the courts.

If the person is in public office or has any kind of public stature he can be called a liar, a cheat and a swindler by newspaper, and unless malicious intent can be proved in a court, the medium has and almost absolute right to do so. There is really no effective way in our court system now that would give an individual running for office or otherwise in the public eye the right to sue a newspaper and recover. It is unlikely the case would ever go to court.

Walter Lippmann, the late columnist, said "It is sophistry to pretend that in a free country, a man (or a newspaper or a public medium of any kind), has some sort of Inallenable or constitutional right to deceive his fellow man. It may be inexpedient to arraign every public liar as we try to arraign other swindlers. But in principle, there can be no immunity for lying in any of its protean forms.

A lie has a certain amount of weight with those who wish to believe it. We are all familiar with some in the media taking a fact and coloring it in order to make it newsworthy. Half a fact can be a whole falsehood.

The law is on the side of the news media. For public official to sue for libelous statements, under the U.S. Supreme Court case, New York Times vs. Sullivan, it is required that actual malice be proved. Actual malice means that the statement is printed with knowledge that it was false or with neckless disregard as to whether or not it was false. Proving that somebody maliciously put an article in a newspaper is almost impossible.

This writer tried a case involving lies published about an Ohio appellate judge in a newspaper. The newspaper said this judge falsified election returns and was under censure by a bar association and did not falsify the election return

But when questioned in court, the reporter who wrote the article refused to who wrote the article refused to disclosed the name of the people supplying him with the information. Later, when he did reveal one of the sources, the source emphatically denied making the statement. But due to the law, the plaintiff-judge had no right to recover unless he could prove that the right to publish with immunity some false or defamatory matter in the newspaper, accusing a citizen of some crime or immoral act, without being held accountable for potentially libelous statements?

In effect the courts have tied the hands of the public figure who attempts to see recovery under the law by the only means now available to him. Certainly the newspaper reporter is not going to reveal the source of his information. And even if he does and the source then denies the statement the plaintiff must still prove that the medium maliciously reported information, knowing it to be untrue.

With the present state of the law, newspaper, radio stations, television stations and the like can publish information with virtual impunity because of the favorable position in which they have been placed by the Supreme Court decisions.

To allow decisions like the Sullivan case to stand as the rule of law for the courts to follow, so that newspapers that publish lies and half-truths are not severely punished by monetary judgments is another erosion of our system of justice and another step down the road in further loss of individual rights.

It is time for the courts to offer more protection fro individuals whose name find their way into newspapers with out endangering the First Amendment.