General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The Limits of Free Speech [View all]onenote
(42,686 posts)In fact, someone could claim YOU lied by suggesting that the courts decided something that they didn't.
And Fox won a case arising out of an employment dispute between a husband-wife investigative reporter team and a local tv station in Tampa FL (not Fox News) where the plaintiffs alleged that they were fired for accusing Fox of engaging in illegal news distortion; the mid-level state appeals court construed the state "whistleblower" statute as only applying in cases where the underlying accusations involved an alleged violation of a law or rule; because the FCC has no formal rule against news distortion, only a policy, the court found that the whistleblower statute didn't apply. As it turns out, the FCC did consider whether the station had violated the news distortion policy and concluded that the dispute was an editorial dispute not a case of news distortion.
Finally, the concept of yelling fire in a crowded theater is from a 1919 case that has been substantially limited by subsequent cases since then, most notably the Brandenburg v. Ohio case in 1969. The article cited in the OP does a fairly decent job in explaining how narrow the exceptions to the First Amendment are.