What was Scalia really suggesting?

“It was wrong,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said “I think the Framers would have been appalled. … It was revising the Constitution.”
Scalia, like many preachers who claim to fathom the mind of God, likes to claim unique insight into the collective thinking of the Framers.
In this case, his complaint is about the unanimous court decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan, 50 years old this year and still the high court's most important press freedom pronouncement.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

In a nutshell, the Sullivan ruling makes it much harder for public officials to win libel cases than it is for private citizens.
Scalia's troubling pronouncement, certainly not his first and doubtless not his last, came Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington, where he made a joint appearance with his personal friend but often adversary on the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
If the Sullivan rule were reversed, it would help shield public officials from criticism. Point in fact, over the decades the court has never seriously reconsidered Sullivan despite Scalia's repeated grumblings. He considers libel a state matter.
With Sullivan, it became a federal matter.
L.B. Sullivan was police commissioner of Montgomery, Ala. who claimed he had been defamed in a paid advertisement in the New York Times. That ad, signed by a number of prominent Americans including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, sought donations for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggle in the South.
Alabama courts ruled that statements in the ad that African American students were being met with "violent intimidation" could reflect on Sullivan, although he was not named in the advertisement. The state courts awarded him the $500,000 he sought.
In unanimously reversing the decision, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time ruled that the First Amendment's free press protections put limits on libel suits against the media by public officials. It's not impossible for public officials to bring and win such suits, but after the Sullivan ruling it got a lot harder. Under Sullivan, an official must show not only that a factual statement is false but also that it was published with "actual malice" or "reckless disregard" for the truth.
The Sullivan rule opened the door for the media to cover this nation's civil rights struggle and a brand of reporting that torments public officials to this day. But beyond allowing reporters freedom to dig deeper into the doings of public officials, the ruling really expanded the right of all Americans -- not just the press -- to freely and openly comment on the performance of public officials, from the local dog catcher to the president of the United States.
That's not such a bad thing, Americans of all political stripes would likely agree.
However, Scalia may be right that the Founders would find Sullivan unsettling given the highly partisan press of their day. The courts of that period were often used by politicians to throttle opposing views expressed by both individuals and in publications. But just because those particular public officials -- who carry the God-like title of Framers -- might find Sullivan disturbing is no more reason to reverse it than Scalia's carefully parsed argument based on a much more disquieting state's rights logic.
When the state's right argument is tendered, the public's antenna should go up, especially when coming from someone channeling the Framers.