Should Journalists Go to Jail for Spreading Russia Lies?

As a First Amendment maximalist, I am inclined to reply an automatic “no” to my own headline — should journalists go to jail for spreading Russia lies? But a penalty of some kind, indeed a serious one, should certainly be levied for misinforming the public on the most important subject of our day, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years concerning the Russia probe. And when these prevarications can be shown to have been deliberate, to have been done knowingly, difficult as that may be to prove, the line to sedition may have been crossed and there is an argument the reporters involved should face legal consequences. They should also be fired.

Unfortunately, because reporting is an occupation with no official standards like law or medicine, no professional organizations to disbar them, and because, as A. J. Liebling wrote long ago, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” with media operations like CNN and NBC often encouraging those very lies, this is unlikely to happen.

Nevertheless. as Kimberly Strassel indicated in “For Fear of William Barr: The attorney general gets attacked because his probe endangers many powerful people,” heads of those who instigated the Russia probe are likely soon to roll. Shouldn’t members of the press who gave them voice be more than unindicted co-conspirators?

Who was indeed culpable when David Corn of Mother Jones and Michael Isikoff of Yahoo.com,not to mention the jejune character from BuzzFeed, were given access to and then promulgated the Steele dossier — a document that, from what we now know, might as well have had “DISINFORMATION” stamped in red on the front page with “Made in the Kremlin” printed not-so-discretely at the bottom. They are intelligent men. Didn’t they realize this?

Of course, they did. Or at least they suspected it. But the ends (the defeat of the orange man) justified the means (helping release this disinfo to the public and spread the lies). Did they do this deliberately? Are they guilty of sedition? Decide for yourselves. (Isikoff later recanted and called the dossier dubious, undoubtedly to avoid having his reputation further besmirched. After the Mueller report was published, he had no choice.)

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