ing back to the demise of the 1798 federal Sedition Act, American democracy had opposed any attempt to smother criticism of public officials, even if it were "vehement, caustic and . . . unpleasantly sharp" (273). Even inaccurate public speech which criticized public official conduct was protected under the First Amendment as an indispensable means of holding public officials to account. To rule otherwise would be to cause a chilling effect on free public discourse: "the pall of fear and timidity imposed on those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which First Amendment freedoms cannot survive" (p. 278).
The Court held, therefore, that state libel laws could not be used to penalize speech which criticized public official conduct unless the person who was allegedly libeled could prove
that the person making the statements did so with actual malice --i.e knew the statements to be false when he made them or recklessly disregarded whether they were true or false. The Court held that si
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