Editor’s letter

Back in 1735, newspaper printer Peter Zenger was charged with “seditious libel’’ for articles that accused the colonial governor of New York of corruption, stupidity, and incompetence. Zenger was acquitted in a jury trial that laid down a crucial foundation for free speech later incorporated into the Constitution. Nearly 300 years later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies want to go back over the same ground and erode this country’s long tradition of press freedom. The Florida legislature is now getting ready to pass two bills that would make filing libel suits easier, especially for public officials—an echo of the seditious-libel laws that made the American colonists indignant. It’s a continuation of the “opening up the libel laws” idea that Donald Trump often mooted but never acted on. The real goal of lowering the bar for libel suits is to silence investigative reporting and critical commentary with ruinous lawsuits that cost a fortune to defend.

The U.S. has gone back and forth on libel law over the centuries, and settled on its current jurisprudence with New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. The history of that case is a study in badfaith libel claims: Montgomery, Al., police commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued the Times over an ad protesting his department’s treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. The intention then was to harass the national press by suing in places like Montgomery to leverage home court advantage. Florida legislators hope for something similar now. Chilling press freedom, though, makes a mockery of legitimate conservative criticism of “cancel culture,’’ campus intolerance, and groupthink. Freedom of inquiry, government transparency, and discouraging frivolous litigation are goals that libertarians and conservatives have espoused for years. If DeSantis takes a wrecking ball to the First Amendment to applause on the Right, free speech will not be the only casualty. American conservatism itself will be redefined, with an authoritarian cast.