And then defamation becomes a way to stop a free press from reporting. The Times V. Sullivan case was a bellwether case for dozens of others across the south during the civil rights era where public officials threatened defamation and lawsuits against newspapers because they didn't like the way they were being portrayed in the press. These judgments against the papers had the effect of the press being muzzled. It's a slippery slope you go down when you say that you do not need to prove actual malice.
On your second point on the state of the media -- I would only say that traditional and legacy media outlets have a much higher standard to publish than most citizens would think. They aren't throwing at a wall and hoping it will stick. Sometimes even when a story comes out that has all the facts and all the interviews, there can be a mischaracterization that goes to the heart of these kinds of defamation suits, and the judgment of the SCOTUS in the original case allowed the press to be a government watchdog without fear of retribution through lawsuits based on small issues that turned out to be untrue, while the scope of the story was still proved to be factual. As I said, it's a slippery slope.
