You ever wonder why right wing news entertainers hardly ever get sued for their libelous remarks about Democratic leaders?
There is a unique rule of tort injury law that protects news entertainers Rush Limbaugh, Bill O' Reilly and Sean Hannity from liability from nearly any slanderous remark they make about any private citizen or public figure.
In tort law a plaintiff cannot bring a libel lawsuit against a defendant with a public reputation as a liar. The legal reasoning is that a known liar cannot damage the reputation of anybody, because nobody will believe the slanderous remarks of a known public liar!
That means that Limbaugh, Hannity and O' Reilly have made so many inaccurate, misleading and untruthful remarks about various people that they cannot be sued for libel because any reasonable person would never believe anything they said. So goes the precedent of law.
Therefore Limbaugh, Hannity and O'Reilly are practically exempt from tort actions and the more they slander people the harder it becomes to bring a lawsuit against them.
By the same precedent of law, a person with a bad reputation or no public reputation cannot bring a slander lawsuit against a Rush Limbaugh type of entertainer, regardless of the content of his slanderous remarks because, under tort injury law, it is not possible to slander the good reputation of a person who doesn't have one.
That means if you are an obscure person or a person who has been already tarred with a bad reputation by Fox News et. al, you have no standing in a court of law to sue a prominent right wing news entertainer for libel.
Fox News and Clear Channel (who syndicates Limbaugh) are fully aware this liar's loophole in tort law, and make all the appropriate disclaimers of responsibility for the content of each of the news entertainer's shows.
Other news entertainers enjoy the same protection from lawsuits.
Howard Stern and Don Imus routinely make libelous remarks about public figures and both men enjoy the same protection from libel lawsuits as the entertainers at Fox News, or Jon Stewart or any other public performer who makes a living commenting on public figures.
It's a complicated legal precedent that gives Limbaugh or O' Reilly the legal protection from libel lawsuits. Under the First Amendment, entertainers or satirists enjoy the protection of free speech.. Limbaugh, O' Reilly, Stewart and Stern present themselves as entertainers, not journalists, therefore nobody has the expectation of accuracy in their statements.
Ask Rush Limbaugh what his job is and he'll say, "I'm an entertainer", because if he called himself a journalist he'd be wide open to libel suits.
But if Dan Rather, Brian Williams or Mike Wallace presented an inaccurate story about a public figure, they are journalists and as journalists they are held to a different standard of liability by both a court of law and their employers. They are required to retract libelous statement, or they will be sued and their employers will fire them.
This fine line between news entertainment and news reporting is exploited by right wing news entertainers because they insinuate that they are making accurate comments about public figures, when they're not.
Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert never present themselves as anything other than entertainers. Stewart and Colbert are not on CNN or MSNBC, or Fox News, they are on the Comedy Central, a cable channel clearly labeled "entertainment", not news.
O'Reilly and Hannity appear on a cable news channel that has "fair and accurate reporting" as it's slogan, but Fox blurs the line between entertainment and journalism by presenting each entertainer in "serious, non-satirical" pseudo-news format.
The efforts of the Bush administration have promoted this degradation of factual content by right wing news entertainers. Part of the Bush/Cheney game plan is to validate right-wing news entertainers as legitimate journalists. The Bush administration frequently uses Fox News as a portal to launch a exclusive stories or propaganda campaigns that aren't even a newsworthy events.
An example of this is Dick Cheney's decision to use Fox News as the exclusive news source to break the story of his comments on his hunting accident.
Republican Party "celebrities" frequently appear on right-wing news entertainment shows as serious guests, but the Democrats seldom appear on Stewart or Colbert's show, and when Democratic "celebrities" appear on those shows, it's clearly in the spirit of satirical jest.
A Democrat would never break a serious news story via the Comedy Channel, or Fox News for that matter, because both cable stations are entertainment news networks, in the eyes of both the law and most of the public.
MSNBC has wised up to Fox's game and presents Keith Olberman's controversial Countdown show each night. For all of his liberal bias, Olberman is still a journalist who acknowledges his own personal bias, unlike the news entertainers at Fox. Limbaugh and O' Reilly never bother to disclose their close ties to the Bush administration or the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
For the sake of transparency, both journalists and news entertainers should at minimum, should clearly disclose their linkage any partisan political groups as a matter of policy. News entertainers should make a statement before each show, that the content of the show is entertainment and is completely unrelated to any ethical standard of journalism or accurate news commentary.
Welcome to America where pathological liars are immune to libel lawsuits and slandering Democrats puts even the most feeble of right-wing news entertainers on the path to fame and fortune as the next media darling of the neoconservative morons and the evangelical Wackos of the Apocalypse.