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The Sullivan case was about an advertisement in the Times, not a news story—a 1960 appeal for contributions to the defense of Martin Luther King in one of his legal tussles with segregationist authorities in the South. There were a couple of minor errors in the text of the ad, which was why the Court was able to rule that just getting the facts wrong about a public figure (Sullivan was the public-safety commissioner in Montgomery, Alabama) didn’t make you a loser in a libel suit. The Court made life especially difficult for future plaintiffs against the press by saying that they would henceforth have to prove “actual malice” as the cause of a mistake—a state of mind that is almost insuperably difficult to establish.