When President Joe Biden gave bumbling remarks about abortion on the debate stage this summer, it was widely viewed as a missed opportunity — a failure, even — on a powerful and motivating issue for Democrats at the ballot box.
The difference was stark, then, on Tuesday night, when Vice President Kamala Harris gave a forceful defense of abortion rights during her presidential debate with Republican Donald Trump.
Harris conveyed the dire medical situations women have found themselves in since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in 2022. Harris quickly placed blamed directly on Trump, who recalibrated the Supreme Court to the conservative majority that issued the landmark ruling during his term.
Women, Harris told the national audience, have been denied care as a result.
“You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot?” Harris said.
The law doesn’t make that distinction, though. ‘Untruth’, falsely claimed’, and ‘lied’ are all the same under the law. The only thing those laws care about is whether your words were true. If I call you a liar in a headline and I can prove you actually lied, you have no case.
Weasel words don’t protect them from lawsuits, it’s just another part of the degradation of journalism and the fact that whitewashing and softening their language gets them more clicks & eyeballs, because it’s less likely to offend people who disagree.
The supreme court says the law does make a distinction if it’s a public figure. Better check your hypotenuse, science bitch.
With public figures, the bar to meet slander/libel includes that it must have been done with ‘actual malice’ – not anything different about which words were used.
The bar for bringing such a case is even higher for public figures than private people, but it’s still not about the word ‘lie’ vs ‘untruth’.
If you’re aware of a single case where synonyms like that mattered, I’d love to know.