The Stop Guilt by Accusation Act, a bill pending before the Maine Legislature, strikes me as the latest example of the right-wing Republican attack on what’s commonly referred to as “mainstream media” — an institution I prefer to think of simply as legitimate journalism.

The bill, sponsored by six GOP legislators, seeks to require media outlets reporting on a “case or controversy” which involves accusations of wrongdoing before a court to provide “coverage of comparable time, place, magnitude, prominence, scale and manner” in the event the accused is ultimately exonerated.  This requirement would be triggered when a prosecutor, plaintiff or petitioner obtains less relief than originally sought and the accused furnishes the publisher written notice and a demand for follow-up coverage.

Noncompliance with such a demand would be deemed a form of defamation and could subject the media outlet to liability for statutory damages of up to $10,000, in addition to actual damages, attorney’s fees and an injunction.

The act has an ostensibly benign goal. In the words of a New Hampshire Republican legislator who introduced a similar bill in his state, its aim is to stop the press from “destroying a person’s reputation” by failing to report an outcome favorable to the accused.

In fact, though, the proposed law substitutes public edict for editorial judgment, and feels like a catspaw of governmental intrusion into First Amendment protected press freedom.

In fairness, follow-up coverage is a good journalistic practice, one that should be, and usually is, followed, at least in high-profile cases.

It’s particularly important to do so when an innocent person has been unjustly convicted of a capital crime or major felony. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973 there have been 185 former death-row prisoners, many of them people of color, who have been exonerated of all charges relating to wrongful convictions for capital crimes.   It’s just as important when someone is publicly named by law enforcement as a “person of interest” in a criminal investigation — like Richard Jewell, a security guard swept up in the FBI’s investigation of the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park bombing — only to be later dropped as a suspect.

However, where freedom of the press is concerned there’s a difference between professional standards and legal liability.

First, under the 1964 Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case, public officials and many public figures cannot sue for defamation when false statements are published about them, unless the publisher knew the statements were false or recklessly disregarded whether or not they were true. Second, the reporting of statements made in official documents or proceedings, such as criminal indictments, is “privileged” and cannot be considered defamatory even if the statements later prove to be untrue.

Frankly, I’m suspicious of any Republican legislation proffered to improve the fairness of journalism, particularly in light of the all-out GOP assault on the profession that has occurred over the past four years.

While president, Trump excoriated and insulted print and television reporters, calling them “lame-stream media,” “enemies of the people,” and labelling their work product as a “hoax.”  He threatened to change libel laws, which he called a “sham and a disgrace,” to make it easier to sue the news media for defamation.

The GOP didn’t just tolerate this inflammatory rhetoric, many Republican politicians, trying to appeal to Trump voters, embraced it with gusto, regularly blaming journalists for every political reversal.

Recently, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz pointed to extensive media coverage to explain the intense public criticism over his ill-considered decision to vacation in sunny Cancun in the midst of an intense winter storm that had crippled his home state of Texas.

“The media is suffering from acute Trump withdrawal, where for four years every day, they could foam at the mouth and be obsessed with Donald Trump, and now that he has receded from their day-to-day storyline, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” Cruz opined during a conservative radio talk show.

Ironically one of the stated purposes of Stop Guilt by Accusation Act is that “the State has a compelling interest to require the press to promote objective truth for the sake of the viability of democracy.”

That’s rich! When in the last four years has “objective truth” in media coverage or, for that matter, the “viability of democracy” mattered to the GOP – even after an armed mob, excited to a fever pitch by Trump with lies about a “stolen election,” invaded the Capitol on January 6, trying to kidnap or kill members of Congress and stop the election certification?

Unlike Republican politicians, traditional journalists, as a whole, are quite hard on themselves. They make a concerted effort to bring honesty, accuracy, fairness and balance to their reporting. They spend a lot of time examining and critiquing their profession’s performance and ethics in conferences, seminars, classes and publications. They issue retractions and apologies for errors. Finally their editorial policies attempt to clearly delineate factual reporting from opinion (the latter being confined to editorials and op-ed columns like this one).

I’ll trust journalistic self-policing any day of the week over a GOP-sponsored law which purports to promote objective truth in media coverage.

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 10 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com