In general, I think, you’re trying to balance a few different things:
- The ability for the public to debate ideas
- Preventing liars from spreading lies
- Not giving the government the ability to decide who is a “liar”, and censor them
- And, likewise, not giving some majority of the populace the ability to decide who is a “liar”, and censor them.
If you ignore #4 then you can pretty well have any standard safely because, at the end of the day, a jury of ordinary, reasonable citizens are the ones making the decision and not the government.
In my life, I’ve seen the UK get caught unawares by scandals like the Jimmy Savile, where some journalists had a reasonable suspicion against the man during his life but were restrained from reporting on it because the danger of making a false accusation in the UK is great.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen here in the US that the average quality of news is one step short of endorsing alien abductions and terrorist conspiracies by half the populace against the other half. The finish success of that sort of news makes me skeptical of ignoring #4.
It would cost millions of dollars to sue any particular entity for that, almost no one has standing against any of it, you’d probably lose almost any case against one of these entities, and they might be able to figure out how to avoid paying.
I think it’s reasonable to say that there must be some middle ground between those two.
Whether that’s a matter of changing Sullivan or not, I don’t know. I could argue that modifying the stock market to reward long term good decisions, rather than focusing on short term returns might be more useful. Likewise, it could be that the real need is reform of the legal world to punish lawyers for bad behavior more easily and more completely, to prevent lawyers from being able to profit from their employers if they are disbarred, to make the legal process faster, and to make the legal process cheaper/subsidized for small plaintiffs.
To take an example from ordinary life, you can almost always win as the good guys in One Night Ultimate Werewolf if you simply point at each person, going clockwise, and ask them what they saw during the night. When you go fast and don’t allow discussions, the bad guys can’t come up with cohesive lies nor raise any credible doubts about anyone else.
The idea that a slow and deliberate legal process is going to be more accurate isn’t necessarily true. Too fast and, sure, you’re not going to get all the information and you’re not going to analyze it correctly. But too slow and a smart and financially mighty defendant can run their opponent out of resources, writing evidence, and then razzle dazzle the yokels in the jury box, having denied them access to most evidence that should have been procured.
An even and consistent tempo, regardless of participants, and equality of resources on both sides in the match might be more important than the standards of guilt.
If someone can’t effectively without evidence, they can’t bullshit the jury, and they’re guilty of they acted with actual malice, that might be sufficient.