However --
I spent my high school years as a debater, quite successfully so. All of my contemporaries became attorneys; one serves as a judge. I learned from that experience that most serious professional activities tend to create their own reality bubbles; lawyers view the world through the lens of the law, doctors through the lens of medicine, salesmen through the lens of marketing. Rarely does anyone escape this; primate programming and the nature of neural pathways make it almost certain that the skin of the bubble will thicken with time.
I used to spend a round arguing the very point at which I would feign astonishment in the next. Intellectual and verbal gymnastics were the honored skills in the debate world, and I suggest that is also the fact in the rarefied air of the legal world. Humans often use reason and rigorous logic to arrive at the most absurd conclusions. Thus do we get Richard Nixon's 'if the president does it, then it is legal' and John Yoo with his well-mapped-out legal opinion that crushing the testicles of a child in front of his parents to elicit information from them is a perfectly legal act for an American president in wartime. Logical, legal, and completely insane.
These days I'm more of a poet than a barrister. I write screenplays and novels, and I run a small company. Very hard to maintain a bubble in these trenches; the asphalt degrades the rubber quite swiftly. And so when I see a professional news entity using public airwaves to defame a young woman, endangering her life and the lives she is trying to save, I presume such an act is actionable in some civil fashion. After all, large corporations and wealthy individuals have successfully sued for far less grievances than this young woman has suffered. Indeed, were I to purchase a television station and begin to run 'news' shows using fake video or sound clips to show that the Koch Brothers are actually baby-eating grandmother-rapers, insinuating that all good citizens should immediately arm themselves and rush to lynch the pair of them, I would expect someone to stop me. And the phalanx of attorneys assigned to do so, I conjecture, would argue vociferously that my actions did meet the extremely narrow standard you are citing.
And I suspect they would win, because money -- trumps -- everything, these days. And so while you may be correct with respect to matter as seen through the pristine lens of jurisprudence, I would argue that a news organization using devious means to urge violence against American citizens should probably not be a legal act, whatever the prevailing technical/professional opinion may be.
Because of other stuff. Mushy, intangible stuff, not necessarily codified in law but well-known to poets and authors. 'Cheating is bad', for instance, or 'we shouldn't encourage murder'. I know, I know, not professionally supportable -- after all, cultural norms, one man's poison, philosophical relativism, etc., etc.
So many words. Still, as you said in your first response, 'indefensible'. Not, apparently, indefensible through the lens of jurisprudence, but through some other larger lens -- ?
Would that there were such a thing as a magnetically-empirical moral compass, I suppose. We could all agree on the fact, then, except for Fox And Friends.
I'm reminded of John Goodman's performance in 'The Jack Bull' as a frontier judge, who had to intervene when a local judge could not be brought to deliberate fairly in the case of a mistreated horse handler. The essence of his judicial wisdom was that the law's most basic purpose is to forestall violent conflict through fair resolution of disputes.
Rubber and road. Deceptively-edited video used to encourage racial violence and defame a young woman, and Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Fairness. Decency. Peace.
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