>>There is this pattern in the MSM - make completely false and nearly insane claims, to "get the word out"...and then back off and issue a lame apology.

Except that they don't usually apologize to political targets du jour because they believe they can attack political figures without consequence. Which is why the NYT could publicly taunt Trump that he was powerless against MSM falsehoods during his campaign. Neither the Founders nor the Warren Court in 1964 contemplated that sort of misbehavior.

Scalia again:

"It made a very good system that you can libel public figures at will so long as somebody told you something-  some reliable person -  told you the lie that you then publicized to the whole world. That’s what New York Times v. Sullivan says. That may well be a good system and the people of New York state could have adopted that by law, but for the Supreme Court to say that the Constitution requires that -  that’s not what the people understood when they ratified the First Amendment... The issue is 'who decides?' Who decides what’s right? And it’s the people. The background rule is democracy, and the rule of democracy is the majority rules."

Could the Supreme Court make such a finding in 2017, that if the NY citizenry wants NYT to be able to defame public figures like this, they need to pass a law? I think so. But in the internet/social media age it would be a jurisdictional mess, as was one of the observations all the way back in 1964. So perhaps the Court need only clarify that a "reliable person" cannot be an alleged unnamed source or three for whom there's no consequence when their whisperings are shown to be lies. If they're "reliable", then surely neither they nor NYT has anything to fear since there's no defamation if it's true. Of course there's the risk of groundless retaliatory law suits, but in the internet age the "Streisand Effect" takes care of that too.