US President Donald Trump is firing up a stunt on Wednesday to try to shame news organisations he doesn’t like. It’s a cheap ploy, but it comes with a serious, sinister sub-text. Trump has been making a case for changing US libel laws to make it easier to punish publishers of news he considers "fake". What he doesn’t seem to realise is that actual fake news is already outside the protection of current laws. That’s the opinion of one of the foremost experts on US libel law, Robert D Sack, a senior judge on the US court of appeals for the second circuit. Sack has focused on these issues for decades; before becoming a federal judge in 1998 he was a libel lawyer representing notable media clients such as the Wall Street Journal. Fake news, "invented and disseminated with the intention of fooling the recipient into believing it is genuine", is actionable under present law, he writes in the latest edition of his definitive two-volume treatise on defamation, Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slan...
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